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Construction Starting on New Cooper Green Facility By Jane eHrHarDt
By January, construction will begin on the new Cooper Green state-of-the-art medical facility where their parking deck once stood on 6th Avenue. The glistening five-story building will cover 207,000 square feet and solve numerous restrictive and costly problems lingering in the current 50-year-old building. “We’ll save hundreds of thousands of dollars just from reduced utilities,” says Laura Hurst, administrator of the clinic since 2019. (CONTINUED ON PAGE 3)
Rendering of the new Cooper Green facility.
A German Psychiatrist Comes to America By Jane eHrHarDt
“I had the luck of the late birth,” says Birmingham psychiatrist Godehard Oepen, MD, PhD, about having been raised in West Germany shortly after WWII. “But we were living in the shadow of it.” His father spent his years in Nazi Germany undermining the regime by joining the Neue Deutschland, a Catholic-based resistance. His grandfather had Huntington’s disease during the Nazi rule. A degenerative disease disorder that strikes as an adult, it manifests as irregular jerky movements from head to foot. They can only remain still while sleeping. The Nazis initially castrated his
Godehard Oepen, MD, PhD
grandfather. Later, they killed him during Tiergartenstraße 4, the five-year campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia of 275,000 psychiatric patients. “The so-called ‘useless members of society,’” Oepen says. “That was the motivation for my father to get into medicine, and me as well, to see if there was something else we could do besides let them die.” The treatment of his grandfather had a lifetime effect. “It was a major
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factor in my life to realize it’s not the main importance what you can do and enjoy and achieve and how much money you make and power and glory,” Oepen says. “It’s how much of what you do is actually useful to others, especially those who are considered useless.” Oepen’s fascination with the human brain led him to medical degrees on two continents, three residencies, and a PhD, all related to neurology and psychiatry. “I wanted to better understand what makes humans tick and why we continue to make foolish decisions that you cannot rationally explain,” Oepen says. Initially, after getting his first medical degree studying in both West Germany and Switzerland, he became a surgeon. But in less than two years, he (CONTINUED ON PAGE 4)
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