About Dr. Mark
When politicians tell their life stories they tend to make themselves bigger than life, like somebody once wrote, “I was born at a very early age in a log cabin built by my own hand.” I don’t think my life is all that special or different from most people. Though I regard my parents as heroes, they were the ordinary kind of people who rise up to meet what challenges come their way. I like to think that they raised me right, to make the best use of what I have look after me and especially my family and to try to make things better for other people with what I have left over—and have a little fun along the way.
I was born in Glendive where may father taught school and my mother was a homemaker. My father took a job with the National Education Association and we lived in Maryland just outside Washington, DC about the time of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. My father had multiple sclerosis and by the time I was in the sixth grade he was too disabled to work we moved to Helena where I graduated from high school and later from Carroll College.
My parents both were born and raised in Roundup. My great grandfather emigrated from Cumberland, England and came to Montana the year it became a state. I understand that he was a hoist engineer at a coal mine near Stockett. Yeah, my family goes back a way in Montana but not nearly as far as native American families go.
I have been married to Laura R. Nicholson MD MPH since 1985. (Best move I have ever made.) We have three kids, two who came the usual way and one with multiple disabilities who came as a foster child. All three are successes in their own ways.
After medical school at the University of Washington, I took residency training as a family physician at the University of Utah. Half a career later, I retrained in psychiatry at the University of Washington. When we came to Billings in 2004, I worked at the Mental Health Center and later opened a solo private practice. I had privileges at both Billings Clinic and St Vincents Healthcare. I cared for psychiatric patients in psychiatric units, emergency departments, medical-surgical units, pediatric units, intensive care units. With the Mental Health Center’s Program for Assertive Community Treatment I attended patients with severe chronic mental illness in their apartments.
My wife like to hike and in retirement we have done some epic backpacking trips: all 106 miles of the Unita Highland Trail in northeast Utah, the 70 mile Solitude Trail in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, the 60 mile “J” section of the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington, a 65 mile reverse modification of the Northern Loop in Glacier National Park and a lot of hikes in the Beartooth, Absoroka, Big Snowies, Crazy and Pintler ranges. I sometimes carry a lightweight Tenkara fly rod but it is humorous to watch me fish. I think that am better with a camera. I still use film.
