Alumni Profile | Dr. Stephen Broughton

MATTERS OF THE MIND

ALUMNUS DR. STEPHEN A. BROUGHTON DISCOVERED HIS DIRECTION IN LIFE WHILE ATTENDING UAPB, AND IT CHANGED HIS OUTLOOK FOREVER.

by Dr. Ann Y. White

Dr. Stephen Broughton is pictured in the main hall of the Southeast Arkansas Behavioral Healthcare System in Pine Bluff, where he works as a psychiatrist.

Brian T. Williams

"...for me, UAPB was about learning what I wanted to do and how I wanted to be. It was the extra touch I needed.”

When he stepped onto the campus of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in the fall of 1975, Dr. Stephen A. Broughton, knew it was where he was supposed to be.

“It was wonderful,” Broughton, staff psychiatrist at the Southeast Arkansas Behavioral Healthcare System, in Pine Bluff, said recently. “I grew up there. So for me, UAPB was about learning what I wanted to do and how I wanted to be. It was the extra touch I needed.”

That extra touch helped propel Broughton into a successful career in mental health care. For the past 11 years, he has been a staff psychiatrist at the Southeast Arkansas Behavioral Healthcare System where he practices general psychiatry for adults. From 1999-2008, he operated the only black-owned private psychiatry practice in Pine Bluff. His success also has brought other prestigious honors, including an appointment to a 10-year term on the Board of Trustees for the University of Arkansas System. The appointment, made by former Governor Mike Beebe, ends in 2022. The board is the governing body for the University of Arkansas System. Broughton currently is the only black member of the board.

Born in Pine Bluff in 1958 to parents, Theodis and Delores Broughton, both AM&N (now UAPB) College graduates, Broughton said he had always wanted to study medicine. A 1975 graduate of Pine Bluff High School, his impressive scores on the PSAT and SAT tests helped him gain a National Merit Letter of Recommendation and a spot as a National Achievement Finalist, accomplishments that brought scholarship offers from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Hendrix College in Conway and Rhodes College (formerly Southwestern at Memphis) Broughton said he had decided to accept a scholarship from St. John AME Church, where he was a member, to attend Hendrix College when some members of the church intervened.

“Many of the professors at UAPB attended St. John, one of them being Dr. Rufus Caine,” Broughton said. At that time, Caine was chairman of the biology department at UAPB. “Dr. Caine said we can teach you what you need to know to be a physician,” Broughton said.

About that time, UAPB had gotten a grant from the Kellogg Foundation which offered science majors a full scholarship with a stipend. Broughton, a chemistry major, was one of the first students to receive the scholarship.

At UAPB, Broughton said he had a different kind of cultural awakening. When he graduated from Pine Bluff High School in 1975, Broughton said that of the 640 seniors, only about five black students were listed in the top 100 students in the class. At UAPB, however, those numbers were different.

“It was wonderful being around black students who were smart and ambitious,” he said. “It was different being in an environment where I was told that I could do things. I felt excited to be in an environment I thought I would thrive in.”

He did thrive. At UAPB, Broughton was a member of the Chemistry Club, Alpha Kappa Mu Honor Society, Beta Kappa Chi Scientific Honor Society and Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.

Broughton graduated from UAPB in 1979, and enrolled in the College of Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. After earning a medical degree in 1990, he completed an internship in psychiatry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical Center and a residency program in psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.

He returned to Pine Bluff in 1994 and was hired as a staff psychiatrist at Southeast Arkansas Behavioral Healthcare System. He was promoted to medical director in 1997, but left the mental health center in in 1999 to open a private practice. He also has worked as an instructor at the Arkansas State Hospital for Mental Illness and the University of Arkansas College of Medicine in Little Rock. In 2008, he returned to the Southeast Arkansas Behavioral Healthcare System as a staff psychiatrist. Despite his success in the field of mental health care, Broughton said he wasn’t always interested in psychiatry.

“I went to medical school with aspirations of becoming a cardiologist,” he said. “I decided to move into psychiatry near the end of my third year in medical school. I was fascinated with the human mind, and there were few African-Americans in the field at the time.”

Dr. Broughton listens to presenters during a University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees meeting. He is currently the only African American member of the board.

University of Arkansas System

After completing his residency in 1994, Broughton said he became the second African-American male ever to practice psychiatry in Arkansas and now is only one of eight black psychiatrists practicing in the state.

Broughton said he is particularly interested in the number of misdiagnosed black men who are dealing with mental illnesses. He said many are diagnosed with severe mental illnesses when they could be less severe. He said such diagnoses could lead to other problems.

“It could cause problems with employment or with insurances issues,” he said.

Broughton said he also has something else of which he is very proud. He and his wife of 26 years, Cheryl Govan Broughton, have two children, Dr. CaLynna Nichols, who is the first woman to graduate from Prairie View A & M College with a doctoral degree in electrical engineering; and Dr. Stephen Thomas Broughton II, a UAPB graduate who is currently a second-year fellow in cardiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.