Thom Hartmann - Biography


Biography of Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann s books have been written about in Time magazine and he has been on numerous national and international radio and TV shows, including NPR s All Things Considered, CNN, and BBC radio. He has been on the front page of The Wall Street Journal twice, has spoken to over 100,000 people on four continents over the past two decades, and one of his books was selected for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. A best-selling and award-winning author, he is also rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, and a licensed and certified NLP Practitioner and NLP Trainer.

Over the past twenty years, he has worked with hundreds of ADD and hyperactive children and adults. In 1978, he and his wife Louise opened the New England Salem Children's Village (NESCV), a residential treatment facility for children on one hundred and thirty-two wooded acres on Stinson Lake in New Hampshire. The Children's Village is based on the family model of the international Salem program located in Germany.

As executive director of NESCV for five years, Hartmann worked with numerous psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers and courts, and hundreds of children and parents. He taught parenting classes, helped train child-care workers, was co-founder of the New Hampshire Group Home Association, and worked closely with that state's governor to develop programs for children in crisis.

NESCV specializes in providing previously institutionalized children with a family model, non-institutional setting, and works, usually, without drugs with children who have nearly all been in some form of drug therapy. It was the subject of three major reports on National Public Radio's All Things Considered afternoon news program, as well as feature articles in Parenting, Prevention, East-West, Country Journal, and over a dozen other national publications and newspapers. In 1998, NESCV will be opening The Hunter School, a residential school for ADD/ADHD children (for more information, call 603 786-9427).

Hartmann also worked with the international Salem program based in Europe to set up famine relief and other, similar programs in Africa, Europe, South America, and Asia, and lived with his family for a year in Germany at the international Salem headquarters. In Uganda, in 1980 (just months after Idi Amin was run out of the country), he entered a war zone and negotiated with the provisional government for land to build a hospital and refugee center, which is still operating and seeing an average of over five hundred patients a day. He has helped set up similar programs in several other countries, most recently traveling to Bogota, Colombia.

From 1972 to 1978, and 1987 to 1991, he taught concentration and meditation techniques through a series of weekly classes, and spoke on these subjects at numerous conferences in the United States and Europe.

As a journalist, Hartmann spent seven years as a radio and television news reporter during and immediately after his college years, and has been published over two hundred times in more than fifty different national and international publications, ranging from the German version of International Business Week and The Christian Science Monitor, to Popular Computing, for which he wrote a monthly column for two years. At one time he was Contributing Editor to, and a columnist for, seven different national magazines, and is the winner of the prestigious Jessie H. Neal award for excellence in reporting. His monograph about dietary intervention in the hyperactive syndrome was published in 1981 in The Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, and one of his short stories won a national award. One of his books (Think Fast!) was selected for inclusion in the permanent exhibit on information technology in medicine at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

Additionally, Hartmann has successfully started seven businesses, one of which made the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Enterprises he has started (and, with two exceptions, later sold) include an advertising agency, a newsletter/magazine publishing company, an herbal tea manufacturing company, an international travel wholesaler and travel agency, a training company presenting seminars nationwide, an electronics design and repair company, and a company which sells computer peripherals. He has published nine nonfiction books and written nine novels, is both a licensed pilot and a licensed private detective (neither of which he practices), and a former skydiver.

The founder of the Michigan Healing Arts Center, and a student of "alternative" medicine, he received a C.H. (Chartered Herbalist) degree from Dominion Herbal College, an M.H. (Master of Herbology) degree from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in Homeopathic Medicine from Brantridge in England (his Ph.D. thesis was published in a national-circulation magazine in the United States, and these degrees qualify him to practice homeopathic and herbal medicine in England, Canada, India, and several dozen other countries). He completed a residential post-graduate course in acupuncture at the Beijing International Acupuncture Institute, the world's largest accredited acupuncture teaching hospital, in Beijing, China, in 1986. He is also a certified and licensed NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) Practicioner and Trainer, and rostered as a Psychotherapist by the State of Vermont.

A student of technology, he held a radio and TV station broadcast engineering license from the federal government, is a former amateur radio operator, a Certified Electronics Technician, and a former engineer/technician for RCA. He currently holds contracts with CompuServe to supervise and operate the Desktop Publishing and DTP Vendor Forums, Office Automation Forum, ADD Forum, International Trade Forum, and half a dozen others. In this capacity, he daily helps serve the needs of CompuServe's millions of members, and can easily be reached online at "Thom@compuserve.com". His books about ADD, business, and spirituality are available in bookstores nationwide.

In the marketing and advertising field (his specialty), he is currently president of Mythical Books, sold in 1997 an advertising agency and newsletter publishing company, has worked as a consultant to dozens of US Government agencies and hundreds of companies, and has taught seminars on advertising and marketing to over ten thousand companies and individuals in the past fifteen years. His clients include over four hundred seventy of the Fortune 500 firms, and he has been a keynote speaker to groups ranging from a Hong Kong banker's meeting, to a symposium on international travel sponsored by KLM Airlines and American Express in Amsterdam, to the California Teachers Association's annual conference. He has spoken to over 100,000 people on four continents.

An inveterate traveler and sometimes a risk-taker, Hartmann has often found himself in the world's hot spots on behalf of the Salem organization or as a writer, a situation which causes his friends to sometimes wonder aloud if he works for the CIA (he does not). He was, for example, in The Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos fled the country; in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot; in Uganda during the war of liberation by Tanzania; in Hungary when the first East German refugees arrived; in Germany when the wall came down; in Peru when the Shining Path first bombed the presidential palace; in Beijing during the first student demonstrations; in Thailand when they were briefly invaded by Laos, then again when the military coup of 1991 occurred, then again when the military were thrown out in 1992; in Barbados during the recent anti-government strikes and shutdowns; in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia, during the spate of killings of presidential candidates; in Israel, in the West Bank town of Nablus, the week the Intifada started there; on the Czech border the week Chernobyl melted down; in Kenya during the first big wave of crackdowns on dissidents; and in Venezuela during the 1991 coup attempt. He has been successful in avoiding some disasters, however. For example, he was out of the country when George Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate.

Born in 1951, he is the father of three children aged sixteen to twenty-four, and has been married to his wife, Louise (a brilliant, very patient, and non-ADD woman), for twenty-five years.