Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez-Roman was born in Puerto Rico. He studied medicine, specialized in Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of PR, and practiced medicine in Puerto Rico, New York, and Massachusetts. His orientation in psychiatry is a biological perspective in interaction with our experiences and history. He is a strong believer that our experiences in life modify our biology, our brains, and our DNA. Transcultural psychiatry is his pet subject. After completing his medical and psychiatry training, he did a clinical fellowship in clinical research at the State University of New York at the Downstate Medical Sciences Campus, Brooklyn, NY, where he learned the anthropological research technique of participant observation. In his first book, The Governor’s Suits, he describes the rating scale, which defines the concept of the colonized personality. This is a concept created by a psychoanalytic psychiatrist, Franz Fanon. Very different from the original creator of the concept, Dr. Gonzalez believes that the decolonization process could be achieved by peaceful means and not by war as Fanon did in Algeria. His research is based on actual interactions with the media, mostly Puerto Rican newspapers, in their public forums. These interactions have served to validate the concept of the colonized personality that is for him the reason that Puerto Rico has been, for the past 529 years, a colony, first of Spain and now of the USA. The colonial status is something condemned by the United Nations Organization. Until 1952, Puerto Rico was on the list of colonies of the Decolonization Committee of the UNO. At that time, the US allowed Puerto Rico to design a constitution, which supposedly allowed self-government. This is totally incorrect, because we became a colony after the Treaty of Paris in 1898, when Spain ceded their colony of Puerto Rico as compensation to end the war. Puerto Rico belongs to the USA and is governed by Congress under the territorial clause of the U.S. Constitution. These are the realities that Dr. Gonzalez wants the world to know. You do not have to travel to Ukraine to find a whole population that does not have full self-government and where the democratic right of self-determination is not respected.
