A new endowment at WMU Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed), made possible by a generous $1.52 million gift from anonymous donors in the Kalamazoo community, will serve as a catalyst for expanding access to child and adolescent psychiatry care in Southwest Michigan.
The Dean’s Endowment for Clinical Excellence in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, officially established in October, will support the recruitment of up to three child and adolescent psychiatrists to WMed and includes $20,000 available for immediate use.
“Specifically, the endowment will fund signing bonuses for the three positions for up to five years,” said Robert G. Sawyer, MD, the Hal B. Jenson, MD Dean.
Eric Achtyes, MD, MS, DFAPA, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry, said the anonymous gift comes at a critical time for Kalamazoo and Southwest Michigan. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), there is a substantial shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists in the region with a need for more than 70 additional specialists to adequately care for the existing patient population.
“This gift is going to help us begin to make an impact on that shortage,” Dr. Achtyes said. “The short-term vision is that we want to bring these new practitioners here now and then build a bridge for a long-term supply of these valuable experts.”
Dr. Achtyes said the groundwork for the new endowment began in 2024 when the donors reached out to leaders in the Office of Development at WMed. The donors were concerned about the difficulty in accessing mental health care for children and adolescents in the community and wanted to take a tangible step to address the issue.
“This gift is transformative, there’s no other way to describe it,” Dr. Achtyes said. “It is bold and visionary for these donors to step forward and make a difference through their incredible generosity. Literally, this will mean that thousands of children who otherwise would not have access or would have to go outside of our region for this care will now have access to local child and adolescent psychiatrists and the treatments they provide.
“We now have the ability to bring up to six child and adolescent psychiatrists into our community every 10 years so it really is a gift that keeps on giving and will allow us to have a significant impact,” Dr. Achtyes added. “We hope that they will come here and fall in love with the community, and want to stay long term.”
Recruitment for the three new positions has already begun in earnest in the Department of Psychiatry. Looking ahead, Dr. Achtyes is hopeful that the new endowment will help fuel the start of a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at WMed, a venture he plans to undertake through a collaboration with the medical school’s hospital partners, Beacon Health and Bronson Healthcare, to further address the local shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists.
That vision, he said, dovetails perfectly with the ongoing work within the Department of Psychiatry to establish a regionally and nationally recognized center-of-excellence for the treatment of depression and other mood disorders at WMed. In 2024, the medical school, along with Western Michigan University and the Van Andel Institute, joined the National Network of Depression Centers (NNDC), a group of 26 leading academic health centers across the U.S., focusing on mood disorder care.
“I am so grateful for the generosity of our donors that have made this new endowment possible,” Dr. Achtyes said. “My hope is that this gift will inspire others to give in the same way so that we can continue to improve access to mental health care in Kalamazoo and Southwest Michigan.”