COL (Ret) Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, M.D., M.P.H.

Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie is the chief clinical officer, Department of Mental Health, for the District of Columbia. She retired from the Army in 2010, concluding five years as the director of the proponency of behavioral health at the Office of the U.S. Army Surgeon General. She has held numerous leadership positions within Army medicine, including that of psychiatry consultant. She trained at Harvard, George Washington, Walter Reed, and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and completed fellowships in both forensic psychiatry and preventive and disaster psychiatry. She is a professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Her assignments and missions have taken her to Korea, Somalia, Iraq, and Cuba. Major publications include the recent military medicine textbook, Combat and Operational Behavioral Health, “The Mental Health Response to the 9/11 Attack on the Pentagon,” “Mental Health Interventions for Mass Violence and Disaster,” and “Humanitarian Assistance and Health Diplomacy: Military-Civilian Partnership in the 2004 Tsunami Aftermath.” She is currently serving as the senior editor of a forthcoming textbook of forensic military mental health, and a journal on the therapeutic use of canines in Army medicine.