Herbert Schreier

Dr. Herbert Schreier is a psychiatrist who specializes in caring for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral conditions. He provides inpatient and outpatient care, including seeing patients in the emergency department. He has been practicing psychiatry at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland since 1977.

Schreier is an expert on transgender and gender-nonbinary children and on mothers with Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP), a condition in which caregivers consciously seek attention by making their children sick or appear to be sick. He is also knowledgeable on Tourette syndrome, international adoption, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, mood disturbances, nonverbal learning disabilities and autism spectrum disorder (including Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism).

Schreier's research focuses on autism spectrum disorder, MSBP and transgender children. He has written extensively on these topics and on forensic medicine topics related to pediatric mental health. He co-wrote a book on MSBP titled Hurting for Love.

At Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Schreier earned his medical degree and completed a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in child psychiatry. He then taught at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, where he was involved in health care activism and evaluated bias in medical research. After moving to the Bay Area, he served for several years as director of the psychiatry department at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, where he championed training for pediatric health care workers in psychiatric and developmental medicine.

A New York City native, Schreier is an active forensic evaluator who testifies in court cases and helped create guidelines on the diagnosis and care of child abuse victims for the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. He helped found the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center's Mind the Gap, a local group of therapists who work with gender-expansive and transgender youth, and has given talks at meetings of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and hospitals worldwide, and provides consultations on a variety of child psychiatric issues in countries throughout Europe and the Middle East. He is a member of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.