Richard McNally

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Richard J. McNally (born April 17, 1954) is an American psychologist and the director of clinical training in Harvard University's Department of Psychology. He studies anxiety disorders and related conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and complicated grief.

McNally was born in Detroit, Michigan. He attended Edsel Ford High School and initially studied journalism at Henry Ford Community College before switching to psychology at Wayne State University, where he earned a BS in 1976. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1982. His mentors included Steven Reiss, Edna B. Foa, and Joseph Wolpe, and he completed his internship and postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University.

In 1984, McNally became an assistant professor at the Chicago Medical School, where he founded the Anxiety Disorders Clinic and directed the university counseling center. In 1991 he joined Harvard University, where he serves as a professor and the director of clinical training in psychology. He is a licensed clinical psychologist and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. He has received several awards, including the 2005 Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Science of Clinical Psychology and the 2010 Outstanding Mentor Award from ABCT.

McNally has published more than 430 works, focusing on anxiety disorders and related topics. He has written books such as Panic Disorder: A Critical Analysis (1994), Remembering Trauma (2003), and What is Mental Illness? (2011). His research has covered memory, attention, and cognitive biases in panic disorder, OCD, PTSD, and social anxiety, as well as the controversial study of recovered memories of abuse. He has argued that there is little scientific evidence that people can repress or dissociate truly traumatic memories.

More recently, McNally has used network analysis to study how different mental health conditions are connected, including PTSD, OCD, social anxiety disorder, and complicated grief. He has also explored broader topics such as the impact of trigger warnings and the epidemiology of PTSD, contributing to many journals and serving on DSM-IV task force committees related to specific phobias and PTSD.