Dr. John W. Barnhill specializes in outpatient psychiatry, seeing private patients through the Weill Cornell Physicians Organizations. He works within the NYP/WCM kidney and pancreas transplant program and is Chief of Psychiatry at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Academically, Dr. Barnhill is DeWitt Wallace Senior Scholar, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, and Professor of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and an Attending Psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr. Barnhill's clinical and scholarly efforts have focused on the assessment and treatment of people who present with some combination of sadness, anxiety, burnout, relationship and work concerns, and comorbid medical conditions.
Dr. Barnhill has written or edited 7 psychiatric textbooks. These include DSM-5-TR Clinical Cases, 2nd edition (2023), which is the case-based guide to American psychiatry's primary diagnostic manual; Approach to the Psychiatric Patient, 2nd edition (2019), a text that includes over 100 authors who are faculty members at Weill Cornell Medicine or Columbia University; and Co-Occurring Mental Illness and Substance Use Disorders: A Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment, edited with Dr. Jonathan Avery (2017). These books have been translated into a total of 12 languages. Dr. Barnhill has served on the editorial board for books published by the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Barnhill writes the Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma section for the online Merck Manual.
Dr. Barnhill has worked in multiple administrative and clinical roles. Within the NYP/WCM psychiatry department, he has served as a Vice Chair and as Chief of the Consultation/Liaison Service, which involved leading the team of faculty, fellows, residents, and students who performed all of the inpatient psychiatric consults at NYP/WCM. He has chaired the department's Faculty Council, the Committee on Faculty Development, and the Committee on Appointments and Promotions. He is a longstanding member of the Committee on Health Justice and its prior committees related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Within the medical center at NYP/WCM , Dr. Barnhill has chaired the WCM General Faculty Council (the representative body for all WCM faculty) and served on its board for a dozen years. He has served as Director of Mental Health Services for all NYP/WCM house staff and is a longstanding member of the Hospital's Ethics Committee. Prior to working with the kidney transplant service, Dr. Barnhill served as the psychiatrist to the NYP/WCM Heart Failure and Transplant team. He is a longstanding contributor to the Lupus and APS Center at HSS.
Within the medical school at WCM, Dr. Barnhill serves on the Progression & Graduation Committee; he had previously served on most of the committees related to medical student education, including the Admissions Committee, the Curriculum Committee; the Committee on Arts & Letters, and the Medical Education Council.
Outside of NYP/WCM, Dr. Barnhill is a member of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Rockefeller University. He chairs the Faculty Development Committee for the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where he is responsible for internal ethics reviews and serves on the Executive Committee. Since 2015, Dr. Barnhill has directed the psychiatry section of the annual Salzburg-Weill Cornell Seminars through the Open Medical Institute. He has served on the WCM Faculty Committee for the
Weill Bugando Medical College in Mwanza, Tanzania.
Dr. Barnhill has served on multiple national committees, including the International Psychoanalytic Association's and the American Psychiatric Association's Committees to the United Nations and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Dr. Barnhill has lectured or consulted throughout the country, as well as the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia.
For these efforts, Dr. Barnhill has won six local and national teaching awards as well as the Miriam G. Wallach Award for Excellence in Humanistic Medical Care, awarded annually by NYP/WCM.
