Ange Lobue

During the 2nd half of the 20th Century, Lobue was able to follow his interest in science as a student, with national and international fellowships in the fields of medicine and psychiatry, and as a neuroscientist, teacher, author, editor, administrator and health care provider. In addition, during the same half-century, he followed his interest in the arts as a student, teacher, performer, director, and producer in theater, cinema and television. The blending of those two careers led to a number of developments, including new teaching techniques, using film and media, designed to enhance empathy, compassion and a therapeutic working alliance in the medical diagnostic interview. He began is career in media as a radio broadcast news journalist and jazz disc jockey in the late 1950s in Hammond, Louisiana, a college town just north of New Orleans, immediately after graduation from high school. During the 1960s, he became a licensed pharmacist and worked in multiple pharmacies to support himself during his medical school education in New Orleans. After earning his medical degree and serving a mixed medical-surgical internship in San Francisco, he was drafted and served as a commanding officer of an Army Medical Corps detachment in Vietnam. While providing medical care for the injured and ill Army combatants, he also voluntarily provided weekly medical care to the Vietnamese children and elderly villagers on a nearby island (Binh Ba) and the Montagnards in the distant highlands (near Dalat). In the late 1960s, upon his return to San Francisco, he worked as a planning coordinator for Regional Medical Programs, a federally-funded effort to establish three new medical schools and facilitate the creation of coronary care units and cancer treatment centers throughout California. Also in the late 1960s, while earning an M.P.H. degree in Health Care Administration at UCLA, he was a visiting scholar in England, Scotland and Yugoslavia, studying the precarious balance between access and quality in the delivery of medical care in two foreign countries and compared them with the medical care in the United States. Through the 1970s, residencies at UCLA in both Psychiatry and Preventive Medicine included health care administration assignments in Washington, D.C. as a visiting scholar and special assistant to the Director of the Health Services and Mental Health Administration, a position equivalent to a "White House Fellowship," and as a visiting scholar and special assistant to the first president of the newly-formed Health and Hospitals Corporation of the City of New York. In Washington, D.C. and New York City, he studied the psycho-political aspects of decision processes at the highest levels of national government and returned to Los Angeles where he completed his residencies and began the next phase of his scientific career. In addition to the private practice of psychiatry, he served as Assistant Clinical Professor on the faculty of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, managed three hospital psychiatry departments, conducted research on the treatment of substance dependence in urban populations (the Watts community of southeast Los Angeles) and served on local, regional and national committees concerned with violence and the media. In 1980 he became a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology. During the 1980s, he served eight years as a medical director of health information and services for Hoffmann-LaRoche, Inc., an international pharmaceutical company, and conducted hundreds of lectures and seminars designed to enhance the diagnostic skills of physicians across the country. He developed "The Patient Interview," a dynamic, skills-improvement, training seminar for practicing physicians, using live actors simulating actual patients, which eventually led to the creation of similar programs which became common techniques for training and testing medical students, physicians and other health care providers throughout the world. Also during the 1980s, as a member of the faculty of the University of Southern California School of Cinema/Television, he taught the Elements of Characterization in the Filmic Writing Program where one student's class project became a commercial film for which he was nominated for Academy Awards in both screenwriting and directing. That student was John Singleton, and the film was "Boys in the Hood." Later he was admitted to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and served on Emmy Awards Blue-Ribbon Panels during the following decades. During the 1990s, he spent 30 hours a week for eight years studying under master Actors Studio affiliated teachers Kim Stanley and Eric Morris learning the actor's craft of sense memory and emotional authenticity. He later conducted workshops in personal development and coaching for performing artists and health care professionals. As producer and/or on-camera professional, he was involved in numerous live and recorded, film and television programs and presentations on a variety of subjects, including coordination of the award-winning film, "Images of Depression," which was the first medical education aid to use clips of celebrated actors in dramatic scenes from popular motion pictures to illustrate the subtleties of psychiatric diagnosis. He appeared in numerous national broadcast network television series, including "Soap," "It's a Living," "Hail to the Chief," as well as an expert commentator on the psychological aspects of current events on programs such as "The Today Show," "Crossfire" and other popular network news broadcasts. He was a Life Member of American Mensa, Ltd. Later he served as a clinical psychiatrist for the developmentally-disabled adult population in Humboldt and Del Norte, the two northern-most coastal counties in California. His focus there was on psychiatric medication management and psychotherapeutic treatment of complex combinations of mental health disorders superimposed on conditions ranging from autism spectrum disorder to profound developmental challenges and neurological conditions. He was best known for his therapeutic techniques, derived from his extensive theatrical performance training as well as clinical application of research on "neuroplasticity" - the brain's capacity to change its structure through "neurogenesis" (new brain cell formation). The goal was to expedite the development of new emotional, cognitive and behavioral tracts in the brain. An intensive focus on moment-to-moment emotional awareness led to enhanced empathy, compassion and authenticity and the capacity to communicate the subtleties of emotional life in performance as well as every day life. His biographical information was cited in the following publications: The Directory of Medical Specialists Marquis Who's Who in the World, Marquis Who's Who in America, Marquis Who's Who in the West, Marquis Who's Who in Medicine & Health Care and Marquis Who in Science & Engineering. In 2012 he began a limited private practice of psychiatry and personal development in a small, office across his garden overlooking the Pacific Ocean above Clam Beach in McKinleyville, California where the giant Redwood trees meet the sea.