Robert N. McLay

Robert Neil McLay is a psychiatrist and the Research Director for Mental Health at Naval Medical Center San Diego. He spent much of his life in school prior to joining the military, having received a BA, an MA, a PhD, and a MD before coming on Active Duty with the Navy. On his birthday, September 11, of 2001, his life changed forever. He was a military physician and the country was going to war. Fourteen times he was told he was going to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, but he was always reassigned. As one of the few MD/PhD psychiatrists in the military, he was put in charge of programs to advance new technology to help Service Members deal with the stress of deployment. Finally, in 2008 he was deployed with First Marine Division to Camp Fallujah, Iraq. This was the opportunity to see if the work in the ivory tower applied on the front lines. While deployed, Dr. McLay tested out Virtual Reality treatments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He interviewed physicians, chaplains, commanders, and Service Members in the field, trying to learn what allowed one person to thrive and another to break in combat. He also wrote to keep himself sane. He is now the author of over 50 scientific articles about mental health and neuroscience, and the book At War With PTSD published by Johns Hopkins University Press.