Daniel B. Borenstein is an American psychiatrist who is the 129th President of the American Psychiatric Association.
Dan Borenstein was born in Silver City, New Mexico. His parents were Isaac "Jack" and Marjorie E. Borenstein (nee Kerr), who owned and managed the Borenstein Brothers Department Store which opened in 1892, and remained in business into the 1960s.
Borenstein attended New Mexico Military Institute (1953); Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S. (1957); University of Colorado School of Medicine, M.D. (1962); Internal Medicine Internship, University of Kentucky (1963); Psychiatric Residency (1963–66); Chief Residency, Dept. of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Medical Center (1965–66). He is a graduate (1971) of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He has been clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Psychiatry and Bio-behavioral Sciences since 1996.[1] From 2001-02, he was president of the American Psychiatric Association.[2]
In the 1980s, prior to assuming the APA presidency, Borenstein wrote academic articles addressing significant mental health issues experienced during medical training. In 1986, he provided expert testimony in a case by a Holocaust survivor, where a Holocaust denier was accused of "libel and intentional inflicting of emotional distress"; the survivor had been harassed for years by Ditlieb Felderer, a Swedish publisher, who sent the plaintiff material that denied or ridiculed the Holocaust.[3]
In 2000, Borenstein testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about the effects of violence in mass media on children: "We are convinced that repeated exposure to entertainment violence in all its forms has significant public health implications".[4]