Dr. Clifford Schilke completed his undergraduate education at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa in 1966, receiving a BA cum laude in philosophy and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Following college he taught secondary school for several years in West Cameroon, West Africa. After returning to the United States, he completed the necessary premedical requirements and an undergraduate major in psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. He then matriculated at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia and received an MD degree in 1978. He completed an internship in Internal Medicine at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh, and then practiced emergency medicine for five years at Butler Memorial Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania. In 1984, he married Patricia Furey who was then completing a PhD in linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. Shortly thereafter, he began his residency in Adult Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. His training also included extensive experience in treating adolescents. Completing his residency in 1987, he then practiced inpatient psychiatry at Hampton Hospital, in New Jersey, for one year, and then accepted a senior administrative role as medical director of the locked inpatient psychiatric unit at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown Pennsylvania. He simultaneously began an outpatient private practice of Adult and Adolescent psychiatry. During this time, his wife decided to switch occupations and studied at Bryn Mawr College School of Social Work, receiving a MSS degree in 1989. Subsequently she had an outpatient practice of psychotherapy in Allentown. Dr. Schilke and Dr. Furey closed their practices in Pennsylvania in 2015, retiring to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After two years of retirement, however, Dr. Schilke decided to return to a part-time practice of psychiatry. For two years, he worked as a contract psychiatrist for several organizations in the Chapel Hill area, and then in decided in February, 2019 to resume outpatient private practice. Finally, in addition to vast experience in the psychopharmacological treatment of the major mental illnesses, Dr. Schilke has received more specific training in different forms of psychotherapy, in 1991 completing a three year program of training in Gestalt therapy with the Gestalt Institute of Philadelphia.