Psychiatry

Philip Brownstein, 82, a federal housing administrator who fought discrimination by developers and landlords, died Sept. 17 in Silver Spring. Mr. Brownstein was a top housing administrator in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who expanded Depression-era housing laws to increase home ownership among minorities.Dr. William Eckert, 73, a forensic pathologist who was a consultant on major cases including the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, died Sept.

A fluently English-speaking alien from outer space pleads with you to help it understand the United States as it is today, as quickly as possible. What single book would you tell it to read and why?Kurt L. Schmoke is mayor of Baltimore.I would recommend "Thinking About America: The United States in the 1990s." This is a collection of essays that asks the right questions about a wide range of issues relating to:1. The quality of life of people in this country, and 2. the role of the United States in the global community.

Dr. Paul R. McHugh was in no mood for fake modesty, not with three days of ceremony and a seminar about to begin in his honor. So when someone casually asked the chief of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine how long a speech he was about to deliver, he had to laugh."

The ancient folk had a name for him. They called him Momus. He was the licensed critic who sprayed the gods with ridicule.Is Paul Rodney McHugh a modern, flesh-and-blood Momus? A persistent faultfinder of the wannabe gods in psychiatry?He hardly seems the type: He's not cranky; he doesn't go around preoccupied all the time. For someone who spends so much time among the depressed and insane, he's suspiciously happy.Probably his reputation has less to do with the way he is than with his annihilating opinions on everything from doctor-assisted suicide (utterly wrong)

Dr. George Ulysses Balis, 68, who directed the psychiatric education of University of Maryland's medical students for many years, died of cancer Monday at that institution's hospital.The Greek-born physician, who began his teaching career at the medical school in 1966, was the author or editor of 11 books and numerous scholarly articles. Though he was a specialist in the field of eating disorders and depression, he was best known as an esteemed teacher."He had a strong speaking voice and was a passionate person.

It all seemed innocent enough. The Library of Congress set out to present an exhibition on Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and also an early stockholder in Broyhill's sofa division.Freud was, as we all know, a great man.He invented, for example, the Freudian slip. Also, the 50-minute hour and the month-long, gotta-get-out- of-the-city-no- matter-how- desperate-my- patients-might- be vacations. Finally, without Freud, there would be no Woody Allen movies. Think about it.Despite all this, the anti-Freudians have attacked the exhibit, on the basis that, in their view, Freud was a fraud.

PHILADELPHIA -- Pamela Freyd says she'd rather be doing anything than telling strangers the wretched details of her family tragedy -- the ugly feud that erupted four years ago when her adult daughter unleashed an account of childhood molestation.The calamity unfolded when her daughter, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, suddenly kicked her parents out of her life, saying she had begun to remember that her father had forced her into sexual contact over 13 years.This is unlike many publicized accounts of alleged abuse: the daughter has filed no criminal or civil charges and stopped talking to reporters months ago. But the parents willingly give interviews, and her mother operates a national advocacy group in Philadelphia for people claiming to have been wrongly accused of physical and sexual abuse.

To hear her attorneys and other supporters tell it, Dr. Margaret Jensvold had a great triumph and possibly even put a crack in the glass ceiling, that metaphorical barrier said to impede the careers of women and minorities in America.But it is evident her victory in federal court early last month was costly to her. And it was won not without possible damage to the age-old, informal method of teaching known as mentoring."I really think my career as an academic researcher is over," said Dr. Jensvold, who graduated in 1984 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Dr. Herbert S. Gross, the county's director of the Division of Mental Health and Addictions, retired Thursday, but he won't be severing his ties to the area medical community.Dr. Gross, 58, will expand his private psychiatry practice in Rockville and continue teaching part time at the University of Maryland. But he also will provide training to staff members at Crownsville State Hospital.Dr. Gross held the county mental health job for six years. Before that, he was a full-time professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine for 21 years.

Hyman Solomon Rubinstein -- a man of broad and stunning talents as a neurologist, violinist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, humanitarian, writer and the inventor of his own shorthand -- died of heart failure March 17 at Union Memorial Hospital. He was 90."During the 1940s, he took in Jewish refugees from Germany, Russia and Argentina and they remained lifelong friends," said Roberta Faith Rubinstein, a daughter who lives in Pikesville. "He visited orphanages and was always giving away money to those who were in need."

* Dr. Harry Brandt has been elected president of the medical staff of St. Joseph Medical Center. His term will run through Dec. 31, 2010. Brandt has been the head of psychiatry at St. Joseph since 1996 and has served as a member of the board of directors there since 2005. In addition, he is the director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt Health System, a guest researcher at the National Institutes of Health and a clinical associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

* Dr. Chi Chiung Grace Chen has joined the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Chen received her medical degree from Indiana University School of Medicine. After completing her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she finished a fellowship in female pelvic medicine, reconstructive surgery and minimally invasive surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. Her interests are pelvic floor disorders, pelvic organ prolapse, urinary and fecal incontinence, lower urinary tract symptoms and minimally invasive surgical techniques for gynecologic and urogynecologic surgeries, including conventional laparoscopic surgery and robotic surgery.

Dr. Frank J. Ayd Jr., a Baltimore psychiatrist who pioneered the field of psychopharmacology when he began treating schizophrenics with Thorazine in the early 1950s, died in his sleep Monday at Lorien Mays Chapel Health Care Center. He was 87. At a time when the psychiatric establishment rejected the notion that mental illness was rooted in biology, Dr. Ayd championed the use of medications to adjust brain chemistry and, in so doing, relieve a patient's suffering. "He was a biological psychiatrist, one of the important kinds of people who in spite of - and against - the establishment had the guts to stand up and really do things," said Dr. Thomas Ban, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Dr. John B. Imboden, a retired psychoanalyst who had been Sinai Hospital's chief of psychiatry, died of acute leukemia Sunday at his North Baltimore home. He was 82. Born and raised in Morrilton, Ark., he attended Notre Dame University; while an undergraduate student, he enlisted in the Navy and was accepted into the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He graduated in 1950 and served in an Army hospital in El Paso, Texas, where he worked with soldiers with combat-related mental conditions.

Dr. James C. Harris, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, pediatrics and mental hygiene at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has received the 2007 Agnes Purcell McGavin Award for Distinguished Career Achievement in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The award recognizes pioneering work in developmental neuropsychiatry, a discipline that unites psychiatry and neurobiology in the study of psychiatric illnesses. Ann Stromberg has been named Nurse of the Year for 2007 at St. Agnes Hospital.

Dr. Wayne Eugene Jacobson, a retired Towson psychiatrist and avid fly fisherman, died of a heart attack Saturday at his Glen Arm home. He was 84. Dr. Jacobson was born and raised in Rock Springs, Wyo., and entered the University of Wyoming in 1941. He enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and served as a corpsman aboard the USS Mount Vernon, a troop ship assigned to the Pacific theater. While awaiting reassignment, he took advantage of the Navy's V-12 program, earned a bachelor's degree in pre-medicine in 1945 from Willamette University in Oregon.

Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001, is teaching and imparting the advice he gathered during his many years in medicine. These days, he is a University Distinguished Service Professor and remains an active member of the Hopkins community. He teaches across the university, including students in the psychiatry residency program at the medical school. While making ward rounds, McHugh will lead talks about drug addiction among the patients. "Occasionally these discussions can be confrontational," he said, adding, "I'm trying to get them out of Dante's hell and into purgatory.

Against Depression By Peter D. Kramer Depression, linked in our culture to a long tradition of "heroic melancholy," is often understood as ennobling -- a source of soulfulness and creativity. Tracing this belief from Aristotle to the Romantics to Picasso, and to present-day memoirs of mood disorder, Peter Kramer, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and the author of the best-selling Listening to Prozac, suggests that the pervasiveness of the illness has distorted our sense of what it is to be human.

Dr. Harry A. Teitelbaum, a retired psychiatrist and neurologist whose practice spanned half a century, died of arteriosclerosis June 30 at his North Baltimore home. He was 98. Dr. Teitelbaum was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of seven children of Russian immigrants. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1929, and was a 1935 graduate of the UM School of Medicine. He earned a doctorate in anatomy a year later. He completed a residency in psychiatry and neurology at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

BEIJING -- A psychiatric examination performed on a former patient held for 13 years in a police-run Chinese mental hospital has concluded that there was no cause for his detention, human rights groups said yesterday in condemning Beijing's political abuse of psychiatry. Dutch psychiatrists who tested Wang Wanxing, 56, over a two-day period early this year found nothing wrong with him after he was released from a type of mental institution known as ankang, or "peace and health," according to the Netherlands-based Global Initiative on Psychiatry, a civic group that sponsored the exam.