Dr Philip K Springer

Throughout most of my adult life, I have been in professions that were centered on helping others. Early in my career, I was a family physician with a practice based in southern Mississippi. For ten years I worked with Head Start children as part of my regular medical practice. Head Start is a program that provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parental involvement services to low-income children and their families. The program's services and resources are designed to foster stable family relationships, enhance children's physical and emotional wellbeing, and establish an environment in which strong cognitive skills can be developed.

In retrospect, I recall how many politically astute people bitterly fought the Head Start program. Subsequently, I believe that programs such as Head Start could have helped to prevent many of the incarcerations of inmates I treated in the Florida state prison system. In1960, I left my family practice and enrolled in the residency program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida. Following the completion of my residency requirements, I became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. In this position, I was heavily involved in the training of medical students, psychiatric residents, nurses, and a broad cross-section of other mental health professionals as well. During the last ten years of my professional life, I served as a staff psychiatrist in the state of Florida prison system.

I absorbed a great amount of information and gained extensive valuable experience from service in each of these venues. That knowledge and experience served as the primary objective in writing this book. I am especially interested in describing the development of a group process that my colleagues and I designed for use in stressful human relations environments. It is known as The Supportive Person Group Process (SPGP). My interest in the process can be traced back to my days at the University of Florida.

While performing my training and administrative duties in the Department of Psychiatry, I became very interested in group dynamics and began to develop a program that we identified as Supportive Person Group Process (SPGP). The book you are reading was inspired by a desire to write about what is and has been happening in my life from a personal and professional perspective. I am a recovering alcoholic, a father, a widower, a retired psychiatrist, and former country doctor. When I look for answers to important questions about life’s meaning, I am looking for something from the heart. When I say, “written from the heart” it is with humility and compassion, as well as a strong sense of urgency inasmuch as I have reached an 80-year-old mindset. This does not imply any form of frenzy, but rather a firm sense of urgency about what I need to do to make it on this planet for a few more years. As for now, it is with considerable excitement that I bring to light the SPGP as a method of therapy that I had let lie fallow for many years.