A physician, a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst, Dr. David Rosen spent 25 years in College Station, Texas, where he held the McMillan Professorship in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M University. When he retired in 2011, Rosen moved to Eugene, a city he had first visited six years earlier. “I house sat for someone on Crest Drive and worked on a book,” he explains. “I enjoyed Eugene.”

Rosen has had more than a dozen books published. His 1993 volume, Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul through Creativity, documents a long-term research project sparked by his interviews with Golden Gate Bridge suicide-attempt survivors in the mid-1970s and offers a therapeutic approach that engages the patient’s creativity.

His most recent book, published this year, is Spelunking Through Life, a collection of 30 haikus, illustrated by Diane Katz. He is currently working on his first novella, a work of historical fiction about Lane County’s enigmatic Opal Whiteley, whose childhood nature diary became a national bestseller in the early 1900s.

As a member of the Pacific Northwest Society of Jungian Analysts, he also still sees patients. “People always said I was funny,” says Rosen, who no longer has a convenient captive audience in a classroom. “I like to tell stories and jokes. When I retired, I got up the nerve to do standup comedy.” Rosen will appear in the guise of Singing Senior Comedian Dr. Nada for open mic comedy night in the Green Room at Doc’s Pad, 710 Willamette Street, between 9 pm and midnight on Thursday, Aug. 11. Dr. Nada warns that the current political situation will be the theme of his presentation.