Dr. Climo grew up in New Haven, Connecticut where he attended Yale College in the late 1950‘s majoring in Culture and Human Behavior.  During the medical school years that followed at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, New York) he spent six months in England studying neurology at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Maida Vale, and psychiatry at Warlingham Park Hospital in Croyden, Surrey where a new concept, social and community psychiatry, was being explored and applied. He received his M.D. in 1964.

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Dr. Climo practiced general medicine for three years, one as an intern (mixed medicine program) at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, and two years as a general medical officer in the US Army (1965-67).  This latter included a year in the Central Highlands of (then) South Vietnam in a counter-insurgency program called MILPHAP (Military Provincial Hospital Augmentation Program) wherein, under the auspices of the South Vietnamese Ministry of Health, he and a small medical team filled vacant positions in a depleted public health service (province hospital, village infirmaries, hamlet aid stations), virtually all the Vietnamese doctors having been recruited away for military duty.  Dr. Climo’s patients were indigenous Montagnards, North Vietnamese refugees who'd been resettled here after the country’s partition in  1954, and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers who’s surrendered and turned themselves in (Chieu Hoi camps).  He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for his military service by the U.S. government and the Gallantry Cross with Palm by the Republic of Vietnam.



There followed three post-doctoral years at the Yale residency program with training in general psychiatry and two at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachuestts with training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Over his 40 year career Dr. Climo practiced in inpatient and outpatient settings, in public and private sectors, speaking English and Spanish (with latino immigrants), as a consultant and as a provider of direct care, and as a teacher, supervisor of therapy, and administrator.  He concluded his practice doing what he had done at the start, traveling to unfamiliar places where they were short-handed, only this time in the U.S..  Those itinerant years are the subject of his book.



 

Dr. Climo is a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.