Dr. Michael J. Murphy was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the grandson and namesake of an impoverished Irish immigrant from County Kerry, Ireland. Born at the midpoint of the Baby Boom generation, he sat in classrooms with 65 other students and a single teacher and graduated from a high school with 3600 other students. As the son of a high school and community college English teacher, he loved literature and majored in philosophy at Holy Cross College, graduating in 1974. He then worked for a time at a residential school in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, which began his long career in human services.

After obtaining a Master’s Degree in Counseling at Springfield College he worked as a protective Services worker and Court Investigator before heading to east Texas to begin his doctoral experience in Commerce. He participated and completed the program in Marriage and Family Therapy and Counseling and after graduating in 1983 worked for a brief period at a counseling center in Greenville. He then headed back east and was employed as a psychologist and then as Clinical Director at a mental health center in North Adams, Massachusetts. He completed post-doctoral residencies and was licensed as a psychologist in 1986. During this period many State psychiatric hospitals were closing and Dr. Murphy participated in and completed a training program in forensic psychology through the University of Massachusetts Department of Psychiatry and, over the next twenty years, completed forensic evaluations in criminal and civil cases in the Massachusetts Superior and District courts and secure psychiatric hospitals. During this period he was also designated a Qualified Examiner and assessed sexual offenders and testified in hundreds of civil commitment cases. Most recently, Dr. Murphy was Chief of Mental Health for the Vermont Department of Correction, supervising mental health services throughout the state’s eight correctional facilities. In 2018 he relocated to Cape Cod in Massachusetts and opened a private practice in psychotherapy in Falmouth. Dr. Murphy has three adult children and enjoys cycling as well as hiking and distance swimming in Cape Cod’s bays and shores.

Dr. Murphy recently published a substance abuse-related recovery book, Opioid Odyssey; A Happy Opioid Crisis Book About What Works, now available on Amazon and other booksellers. He previously published a book on fathering, Popsicle Fish: Tales of Fathering and has published hundreds of newspaper columns, for which he was awarded the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Award.