After attending Wheaton College, Peter Olsson trained at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. After an internship in mixed medicine at the University of Vermont, Dr. Olsson took a psychiatry residency at Baylor (1968-1971). He served as a psychiatrist at Oakland Naval Hospital from 1971-73 running the substance abuse unit and working with the POWs returning from Vietnam prisons. Olsson later graduated from the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in Houston and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy while teaching psychotherapy in Houston for 25 years… and subsequently in New Hampshire from 1995-2011.
Having retired from active clinical work to write full time in September 2011, Peter Olsson was formerly an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School and an adjunct professor of clinical psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Olsson received the Judith Baskin Offer Prize in 1980 for his paper, "Adolescent involvement in Cults and the Supernatural". Dr. Olsson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.