AUTHOR BIO:

Manuel S. Valencia, MD was born in Manila, Philippines in 1940, a year before World War II and the Japanese occupation of the islands. He never saw his father who was a war casualty. He was the only child of his mother, and because of WW II grew up with his aunt’s family, mother’s oldest sister, married to a physician with three boys. He was instrumental in inspiring him to pursue Medicine as his vocation. He therefore grew up and belonged to the Ira family.

He received his elementary and high school education at the Ateneo de Manila, a Jesuit run school along with his three Ira cousins, and obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1964 at the Far Eastern University in Manila, Philippines. Internship is included in the medical curriculum and spent majority of the year at Silliman University in Dumaguete City and some months at the Far Eastern University Hospital as well as the Children’s Hospital in Quezon City.

In medical school he was president of the Institute of Medicine Student Catholic Action (1960-61), president of his third year class (1962-63) and vice president of the Institute of Medicine Student Council (1962-63).

He came to the United States for another year of required internship at Springfield Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1965 and he completed his residency training in Psychiatry in 1969 at Norwich Hospital, Norwich, CT. After that he took up Child Psychiatry as his sub-specialty at the Menninger School of Psychiatry when it was still in Topeka, KS (now under Tulane University in Houston, TX) from 1969-71.

Meanwhile, the Far Eastern University Institute of Medicine moved to Quezon City, progressed and developed and give a new name called FEU (Far Eastern University) Nicanor Reyes Medical Foundation Institute of Medicine, named after the university founder and first president.

He was involved in hospital and private office practice as well as out-patient clinics in Kansas, New York, Massachusetts, West Virginia. Arizona and California. He spent a few years in Forensic Psychiatry at the Kansas State Reception and Diagnostic Center in Topeka, KS (1974-77) and in Prison Psychiatry with the New York State Department of Corrections (1994-2000) as well as Federal Bureau of Prisons in Lompoc, California (2007-2014). He served as consultant in a number of hospitals, juvenile institutions and nursing homes.

He was chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Benedictine Hospital (1988-1990) in Kingston, New York, president of the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Society in 1989-90 and was a legislative representative of the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Society to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Assembly from 1991 to 1997. He was president of Philippine Psychiatrists in America 1997-98. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Ulster County Medical Society in 1985-86. He was appointed by the APA president to the Nomination Committee of the APA in 1998, a committee established to select office candidates of the APA.

He is a diplomate awarded by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1980. He became a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association in 1997 and a Distinguished Fellow in 2003.

In his later years he practiced as locum tenens for five years before retiring in 2020. He married his wife Lee Librojo in 1973 in Topeka, Kansas and they have two children, Anthony and Dennis. His wife Lee passed away in January, 2022.

In the community he is a member of the Knights of Columbus and served as Grand Knight from 2013 to 2015. He was co-founder of Kingston Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration and its first overall coordinator located at the Immaculate Conception Parish Church which opened in October, 1997 inaugurated by New York Cardinal John O’Connor and it continues to be open up to the present.