Damon Tweedy

In 2015, Damon Tweedy published a memoir whose title described the world he had trained in: Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine. The book reflects on his training and practice as a Black doctor, the challenges confronting Black physicians and the disproportionate health burdens carried by Black patients. It made the New York Times bestseller list, according to his Duke faculty profile. National Public Radio interviewed him about the book the year it appeared.

Tweedy earned his medical degree at Duke University in 2000, then took a detour through law: he graduated from Yale Law School in 2003, concentrating on health policy and medical ethics, before returning to Duke to complete his specialty training in psychiatry. Duke's faculty directory lists him as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a staff psychiatrist in the Durham Veterans Affairs health system.

His clinical and teaching responsibilities connect mental health with everyday medical care. At the VA, he directs a team working across six primary-care clinics. At Duke, he teaches behavioral health and aspects of the doctor-patient relationship.

In a 2016 interview with STAT News, he described being the only African American provider in a training clinic and discussed barriers faced by uninsured patients, subjects the memoir had put on the page.

In April 2024, he published Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine. The book draws on his days working in outpatient clinics and argues for treating mental health care as part of medicine.

Across both books, the subject is the same from two directions: what it is like to be a Black physician inside the medical system, and what patients encounter when they seek care within it. Amazon named Facing the Unseen a best nonfiction book of the month for April 2024. The VA clinics where he directs a team embed mental health care inside routine primary-care visits, the same integration his second book argues medicine needs. Tweedy continues to treat patients at the Durham VA and to teach at Duke.