Nanette Gartrell

Nanette Gartrell, MD, is an American psychiatrist, researcher, lesbian activist and writer. Gartrell is the author of over 70 research reports on topics ranging from medical student depression to lesbian mothers and their children to sexual exploitation of patients by healthcare professionals. Her ground-breaking investigation into physician misconduct led to a clean-up of professional ethics codes and the criminalization of boundary violations. For this work, she was featured in a PBS "Frontline" documentary My Doctor, My Lover.

She is the author of My Answer Is NO. . . . If That's Okay with You: How Women Can Say NO with Confidence.

Education & Affiliations

Gartrell attended Stanford University (class of 1971) and the University of California, trained at Harvard, and has been a Williams Institute Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the UCLA School of Law since 2009. She has had a guest appointment at the University of Amsterdam since 2009. She served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976 to 1987, and was on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, from 1988 to 2011. Gartrell has a private psychiatry practice, and for 13 years volunteered her psychiatric services to chronically mentally ill homeless people. An experience in one of these shelters became the basis for her piece in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, "A Tenderloin Tail."