William H. Reid is an Americanforensic psychiatrist based in Texas. Reid has givenexpert witness testimony on several high-profile legal cases and has contributed to various academic publications.
Reid graduated with aB.A. in psychology in 1966 and completed hisM.D. medical degree in 1970, both at theUniversity of Minnesota. He undertook a psychiatric residency at theUniversity of California, Davis, between 1970 and 1975, interrupted formilitary service. He then obtained aMaster of Public Health (M.P.H) qualification from theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1975.[1]
Reid is a professor atTexas Tech University Health Sciences Center, theTexas A&M College of Medicine, and theUniversity of Texas Dell Medical School.[2] He was the Medical Director of theTexas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation from 1989 to 1996. He has authored or co-authored over 300 publications and abstracts, and 17 books, includingA Dark Night in Aurora, which described the life of, mass shooting by, and trial of James Holmes.[1]
For the 2015 trial ofJames Holmes for the2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting, Reid was retained as Judge Carlos Samour, Jr.'s independent forensic expert. He reported around 300 hours of preparation and conducted 22 hours of perpetrator interviews which were shown in their entirety to the jury. He reportedly was paid $500,000.[3] He nearly caused amistrial by immediately openly opining that Holmes met the legal standard of sanity.[4] TheBBC in 2017 reported that Reid had told them the shooting "was completely unrelated to the medication. For me, it was a result of mental illness" (but not sufficient illness to find him legally insane at the time).[5]
In 2005 Reid supported psychiatristPark Dietz over erroneous testimony that had contributed to a guilty verdict and a possible execution ofAndrea Yates. Dietz had testified that Yates got the idea of drowning children and claimingpostpartum psychosis from a recent episode ofLaw and Order, a TV show Dietz had consulted on, but later admitted such an episode didn't exist and that Yates hadn't told him she watched the show. Reid called it an 'accident' and 'off-the-cuff answer' that shouldn't affect Dietz's credibility, blaming the prosecutor for exploiting it.[6]
In 2001 Reid reported on statistics resulting from a law in Texas that all deaths within two weeks ofElectroconvulsive therapy be reported to the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation; the article concluded that "Themortality rate associated with ECT (less than two per 100,000 treatments) in Texas is extremely low" and opposed the reporting of deaths within two weeks.[7] A 2010 British study reported the Reid article as concluding that suicides after ECT were unrelated to the treatment itself, but were themselves "unable to determine whether ECT suicides occurred due to relapse or to the receipt of ECT".[8]
In 1999 Reid published an informal survey of psychiatrists who had personally, or knew of relatives who had personally, undergoneelectroconvulsive therapy. Reid reported in abstract that based on the psychiatrists' informal perceptions, "Almost all patients had moderate to excellent improvement" while clarifying in the full text that this was "sometimes with lasting relief". Reid alleged that later limited availability of ECT contributed to two suicides.[9]
In 1998 Reid, along with an economist fromNovartis pharmaceutical company, reported a significantly lower rate of suicides in patients prescribedclozapine.[10]Yale professor of psychiatry Michael Sernyak and others have critiqued the statistical comparison for excluding suicides by people who had discontinued clozapine, a factor potentially linked to suicide, as well as not systematically establishing the basic demographic equivalence of the groups.[11][12][13][14]
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