James Gilligan

James Gilligan is an American psychiatrist and author, husband of Carol Gilligan and best known for his series of books entitled Violence, where he draws on 25 years of work in the American prison system to describe the motivation and causes behind violent behavior.

During his career, Gilligan has served as director for the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison system and as president of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He now lectures at the Department of Psychiatry, New York University. Gilligan is an adjunct professor at NYU Law and collegiate professor at NYU's College of Arts and Sciences. He has been on the faculty at NYU since 2002.

Previously, Gilligan was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, where he worked from 1966 to 2000. In 1977 he became the director of the Harvard Institute of Law and Psychiatry.

Gilligan was brought in as the medical director of the Massachusetts prison mental hospital in Bridgewater, Massachusetts because of the high suicide and murder rates within their prisons. When he left ten years later the rates of both had dropped to nearly zero.

Gilligan served as the psychiatric adviser to Martin Scorsese for the film, Shutter Island.

Books authored

 * Violence - Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes – 1996
 * Violence - Reflections on a National Epidemic – 1997
 * Violence - Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic – 1999
 * Violence - Reflections on a Western Epidemic – 2000
 * Violence in California Prisons: A Proposal for Research into Patterns and Cures – 2000
 * Preventing Violence – 2001
 * Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous to Your Health Than Others – 2011 (ISBN 978-0745649818)