Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 23 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1933 – Benedict Groeschel, American priest, psychologist, and talk show host (d. 2014).

Benedict Groeschel

Benedict Joseph Groeschel, C.F.R. (23 July 1933 to 03 October 2014) was an American Franciscan friar, Catholic priest, retreat master, author, psychologist, activist, and television host. He hosted the television talk programme Sunday Night Prime (originally Sunday Night Live) broadcast on the Eternal Word Television Network, as well as several serial religious specials.

He founded the Office for Spiritual Development for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He was Associate Director of the Trinity Retreat House for clergy and executive director of St. Francis House. He was professor of pastoral psychology at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York and an adjunct professor at the Institute for Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia. He was one of the founders of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and among his close friends were Mother Teresa, Mother Angelica and Alice von Hildebrand.

On This Day … 22 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1881 – Augusta Fox Bronner, American psychologist, specialist in juvenile psychology (d. 1966).
  • 1893 – Karl Menninger, American psychiatrist and author (d. 1990).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – George Armitage Miller, American psychologist and academic (b. 1920).

Augusta Fox Bronner

Augusta Fox Bronner (22 July 1881 to 11 December 1966) was an American psychologist, best known for her work in juvenile psychology.

She co-directed the first child guidance clinic, and her research shaped psychological theories about the causes behind child delinquency, emphasizing the need to focus on social and environmental factors over inherited traits.

In 1913, while taking a summer course at Harvard University, Bronner met Chicago neurologist and professor William Healy. Healy was equally interested in the study of child delinquency, and subsequently hired Bronner to work as a psychologist at his Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute. In 1914, the institute was renamed the Psychopathic Clinic of the Juvenile Court, and Bronner soon became the assistant director. Bronner and Healy proceeded to shape the study and treatment of delinquent youth, contributing to the scientific understanding that most juvenile crime stemmed from “mental repressions, social conflicts, and family relations”, not hereditary factors. Among other research, Bronner identified that delinquency often arose as a result of placing children with learning disabilities or special abilities in the wrong kinds of educational environments.

In 1917, Bronner and Healy took up new positions at the Judge Baker Foundation of Boston (later the Judge Baker Children’s Centre), a new publicly funded child guidance clinic attached to the Boston juvenile court. Bronner handled most of the psychological examinations of youth, as well as interviews with girls and the youngest children. In 1927, Bronner and Healy wrote the influential Manual of Individual Mental Tests and Testing, a comprehensive guide to assessing a patient’s mental state. Although Healy was originally given the full position of director, with Bronner acting as assistant director, Bronner eventually became co-director of the Foundation in 1930. The Judge Baker Foundation soon became a model for other child guidance clinics across the country, with its co-directors developing important psychiatric practices such as the “team” method, in which psychologists worked together with social workers and physicians to treat a patient.

On 19 November 1930, Bronner and Healy were invited by President Herbert Hoover to attend the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection.

During the 1930s, Bronner also worked briefly in New Haven, Connecticut, as Director of the short-lived Research Institute of Human Relations at Yale University. She was president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in 1932.

Karl Menninger

Karl Augustus Menninger (22 July 1893 to 18 July 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a member of the Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

George Armitage Miller

George Armitage Miller (03 February 1920 to 22 July 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.

Miller began his career when the reigning theory in psychology was behaviourism, which eschewed the study of mental processes and focused on observable behaviour. Rejecting this approach, Miller devised experimental techniques and mathematical methods to analyse mental processes, focusing particularly on speech and language. Working mostly at Harvard University, MIT and Princeton University, he went on to become one of the founders of psycholinguistics and was one of the key figures in founding the broader new field of cognitive science, circa 1978. He collaborated and co-authored work with other figures in cognitive science and psycholinguistics, such as Noam Chomsky. For moving psychology into the realm of mental processes and for aligning that move with information theory, computation theory, and linguistics, Miller is considered one of the great twentieth-century psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era.

What was TeenScreen?

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Introduction

The TeenScreen National Centre for Mental Health Checkups at Columbia University was a national mental health and suicide risk screening initiative for middle- and high-school age adolescents.

On 15 November 2012, according to its website, the programme was terminated. The organisation operated as a centre in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at Columbia University, in New York City.

The programme was developed at Columbia University in 1999, and launched nationally in 2003. Screening was voluntary and offered through doctors’ offices, schools, clinics, juvenile justice facilities, and other youth-serving organisations and settings. As of August 2011, the programme had more than 2,000 active screening sites across 46 states in the United States, and in other countries including Australia, Brazil, India and New Zealand.

Screening Programme

Organisation

The programme was developed by a team of researchers at Columbia University, led by David Shaffer. The goal was to make researched and validated screening questionnaires available for voluntary identification of possible mental disorders and suicide risk in middle and high school students. The questionnaire they developed is known as the Columbia Suicide Screen, which entered into use in 1999, an early version of what is now the Columbia Health Screen. In 2003, the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, created under the administration of George W. Bush, identified the TeenScreen program as a “model” programme and recommended adolescent mental health screening become common practice.

The organisation launched an initiative to provide voluntary mental health screening to all US teens in 2003. The following year, TeenScreen was included in the national Suicide Prevention Resource Centre’s (SPRC) list of evidence-based suicide prevention programmes. In 2007, it was included as an evidence-based programme in the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s National Registry of Evidence-based Programmes and Practices. In 2009, the organisation launched the TeenScreen Primary Care initiative to increase mental health screening by paediatricians and other primary care providers, the same year the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended annual adolescent mental health screening as part of routine primary care, and the Institute of Medicine recommended expansion of prevention and early identification programmes.

As of 2011, the programme was led by executive director Laurie Flynn, deputy executive director Leslie McGuire and scientific advisor Mark Olfson, M.D., alongside a National Advisory Council of healthcare professionals, educators and advocates.

As of 15 November 2012, TeenScreen has been terminated, will no longer train or register new programmes, and will cease all operations by the end of the year.

Mission and Locations

The mission of the TeenScreen National Centre was to expand and improve the early identification of mental health problems in youth. In particular, TeenScreen aimed to find young people at risk of suicide or developing mental health disorders so they could be referred for a comprehensive mental health evaluation by a health professional. The programme focuses on providing screening to young people in the 11-18 age range. From 2003 until 2012, the programme was offered nationally in schools, clinics, doctors’ offices and in youth service environments such as shelters and juvenile justice settings. As of August 2011, more than 2,000 primary care providers, schools and community-based sites in 46 states offered adolescent mental health screening through the TeenScreen National Centre. In addition, the screening was also being provided in other countries including Australia, Brazil, India, New Zealand and Scotland.

Screening Process

TeenScreen provided materials, training and technical help through its TeenScreen Primary Care and Schools and Communities programmes for primary care providers, schools and youth-serving organisations that provided mental health screening to adolescents. A toolkit was provided, including researched and validated questionnaires, instructions for administering, scoring and interpreting the screening responses. Primary care programme materials included information on primary care referrals for clinical evaluation. In the school and community setting, the screening process was voluntary and required active parental consent and participant assent prior to screening sessions.

The validated questionnaires included items about depression, thoughts of suicide and attempts, anxiety, and substance use. The screening questionnaires typically took up to ten minutes for an adolescent to complete. Once the responses to the questionnaire had been reviewed, any adolescent identified as being at possible risk for suicide or other mental health concerns would then assessed by a health or mental health professional. The result of this assessment determined whether the adolescent could be referred for mental health services. If this was the case, parents were involved and provided with help locating the appropriate mental health services.

Research, Endorsements and Responses

Recommendations and Research

Mental health screening has been endorsed by the former US Surgeon General David Satcher, who launched a “Call to Action” in 1999 encouraging the development and implementation of safe, effective school-based programmes offering intervention, help and support to young people with mental health issues. TeenScreen is included as an evidence-based programme in the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices as a scientifically tested and reviewed intervention. In addition, the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended in 2009 that mental health screening for teenagers be integrated into routine primary care appointments.

Studies have been conducted on the effectiveness and impact of mental health screening for young people. In a 2004 systematic evidence review, the US Preventive Services Task Force found that there were no studies that addressed whether screening as part of primary care reduced morbidity and mortality, nor any information of the potential risks of screening. In a later review, published in 2009, the task force found that there was evidence supporting the efficacy of screening tools in identifying teenagers at risk of suicide or mental health disorders.

A team of researchers from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute completed a randomised controlled clinical trial on the impact of suicide screening on high school students in New York State from 2002-2004. The study found that students who were given a questionnaire about suicide were no more likely to report suicidal thoughts after the survey than students in the control group who had not been questioned. Neither was there any greater risk for “high risk” students. A subsequent study by the researchers, in 2009, found that screening appeared to increase the likelihood that adolescents would receive treatment if they were at risk for mental health disorders or suicide.

A study published in 2011, involving 2,500 high school students, examined the value of routine mental health screening in school to identify adolescents at-risk for mental illness, and to connect those adolescents with recommended follow-up care. The research, conducted between 2005 and 2009 at six public high schools in suburban Wisconsin, found that nearly three out of four high school students identified as being at-risk for having a mental health problem were not in treatment at the time of screening. Of those students identified as at-risk, a significant majority (76.3%) completed at least one visit with a mental health provider within 90 days of screening. More than half (56.3%) received minimally adequate treatment, defined as having three or more visits with a provider, or any number of visits if termination was agreed to by the provider.

A separate study published in 2011, found that mental health screening was effective at connecting African-American middle school students from a predominantly low-income area with school-based mental health services. Researchers have also found evidence to support the addition of mental health screenings for adolescents while undergoing routine physical examinations.

Acceptance and Critical Responses

Recommendations endorsing adolescent mental health screening have been issued by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF). The American Academy of Paediatrics recommends assessment of mental health at primary care visits and suggests the use of validating screening instruments. These add to statements and recommendations to screen adolescents for mental illness from the American Medical Association (AMA), the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the National Association of Paediatric Nurse Practitioners. TeenScreen has been endorsed by a number of organizations, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and federal and state commissions such as the New Freedom Commission.

There is opposition to mental health screening programmes in general and TeenScreen in particular, from civil liberties, parental rights, and politically conservative groups. Much of the opposition is led by groups who claim that the organization is funded by the pharmaceutical industry; however, in 2011, an inquiry launched by Senator Charles E. Grassley into the funding of health advocacy groups by pharmaceutical, medical-device, and insurance companies demonstrated to Senator Grassley’s satisfaction that TeenScreen does not receive funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Senator Grassley sent a letter to TeenScreen and 33 other organisations like the American Cancer Society asking about their financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. TeenScreen replied saying they did not accept money from medical companies.

In 2005, TeenScreen was criticised following media coverage of a suit filed a local screening programme in Indiana by the parents of a teenager who had taken part in screening. The suit alleged that the screening had taken place without parents’ permissions. The complaint led to a change in how parental consent was handled by TeenScreen sites. In 2006, the programme’s policy was amended so that active rather than passive consent was required from parents before screening adolescents in a school setting.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeenScreen >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 20 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1925 – Frantz Fanon, French-Algerian psychiatrist and philosopher (d. 1961).
  • 1927 – Ian P. Howard, English-Canadian psychologist and academic (d. 2013).

People (Deaths)

  • 2009 – Mark Rosenzweig, American psychologist and academic (b. 1922).

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 to 06 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department).

His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonisation and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria’s War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

Fanon has been described as “the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time.” For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organisations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental-health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This influential work focuses on what he believed is the necessary role of violence by activists in conducting decolonisation struggles.

Ian P. Howard

Ian Porteus Howard (20 July 1927 to 01 June 2013) was a Canadian psychologist and researcher in visual perception at York University in Toronto.

Ian Howard was born in Lancashire, England, close to the Yorkshire border. He studied for a BSc at Manchester University, graduating in 1952. Howard held academic positions in Departments of Psychology at Durham University (1953-1964) (from which he obtained his PhD in 1965), at New York University (1965), and at York University in Toronto (1966-2013). At York University, he contributed to the development of the Department of Psychology and, in 1992 founded the Centre for Vision Research (CVR).

Mark Rosenzweig

Mark Richard Rosenzweig (12 September 1922 to 20 July 2009) was an American research psychologist whose research on neuroplasticity in animals indicated that the adult brain remains capable of anatomical remodelling and reorganisation based on life experiences, overturning the conventional wisdom that the brain reached full maturity in childhood.

On This Day … 18 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1921 – Aaron Beck, American psychiatrist and academic (d. 2021).

People (Deaths)

  • 1990 – Karl Menninger, American psychiatrist and author (b. 1896).

Aaron Beck

Aaron Temkin Beck (18 July 1921 to 01 November 2021) was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). His pioneering methods are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed self-report measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression. In 1994 he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded the non-profit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, which provides CBT treatment and training, as well as research. Beck served as President Emeritus of the organisation up until his death.

Beck was noted for his writings on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics. He published more than 600 professional journal articles, and authored or co-authored 25 books. He was named one of the “Americans in history who shaped the face of American psychiatry”, and one of the “five most influential psychotherapists of all time” by The American Psychologist in July 1989. His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Martin Seligman to refine his own cognitive techniques and later work on learned helplessness.

Karl Menninger

Karl Augustus Menninger (22 July 1893 to 18 July 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a member of the Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

Beginning with an internship in Kansas City, Menninger worked at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and taught at Harvard Medical School. In 1919, he returned to Topeka where, together with his father, he founded the Menninger Clinic. By 1925, they had attracted enough investors, including brother William C. Menninger, to build the Menninger Sanitarium. His book, The Human Mind, which explained the science of psychiatry, was published in 1930.

The Menninger Foundation was established in 1941. After World War II, Karl Menninger was instrumental in founding the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, in Topeka. It became the largest psychiatric training centre in the world. He was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.

In 1946 he founded the Menninger School of Psychiatry. It was renamed in his honour in 1985 as the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Science. In 1952, Karl Targownik, who would become one of his closest friends, joined the Clinic.

On This Day … 17 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1911 – Heinz Lehmann, German-Canadian psychiatrist and academic (d. 1999).
  • 1923 – Jeanne Block, American psychologist (d. 1981).

People (Deaths)

  • 1991 – John Patrick Spiegel, American psychiatrist and academic (b. 1911).

Heinz Lehmann

Heinz Edgar Lehmann OC FRSC (17 July 1911 to 07 April 1999) was a German-born Canadian psychiatrist best known for his use of chlorpromazine for the treatment of schizophrenia in 1950s and “truly the father of modern psychopharmacology.”

In 1973, he was a member of the Nomenclature Committee of the American Psychiatric Association that decided to drop homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), i.e. to depathologise it.

Jeanne Block

Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block (17 July 1923 to 04 December 1981) was an American psychologist and expert on child development.

She conducted research into sex-role socialisation and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centred personality framework. Block was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted her research with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an active researcher when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.

John Patrick Spiegel

John Paul Spiegel (17 March 1911 to 17 July 1991) was an American psychiatrist, and expert on violence and combat stress and the 103rd President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

As president-elect of the APA in 1973, he helped to change the definition of homosexuality in the DSM which had previously described homosexuality as sexual deviance and that homosexuals were pathological.

On This Day … 16 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1902 – Alexander Luria, Russian psychologist and physician (died 1977).
  • 1923 – Chris Argyris, American psychologist, theorist, and academic (died 2013).

Alexander Luria

Alexander Romanovich Luria (Russian: Алекса́ндр Рома́нович Лу́рия; 16 July 1902 to 14 August 1977) was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology.

He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological tests during his clinical work with brain-injured victims of World War II, which are still used in various forms. He made an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions and integrative processes of the brain in general. Luria’s magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (1962), is a much-used psychological textbook which has been translated into many languages and which he supplemented with The Working Brain in 1973.

It is less known that Luria’s main interests, before the war, were in the field of cultural and developmental research in psychology. He became famous for his studies of low-educated populations of nomadic Uzbeks in the Soviet Uzbekistan arguing that they demonstrate different (and lower) psychological performance than their contemporaries and compatriots under the economically more developed conditions of socialist collective farming (the kolkhoz). He was one of the founders of Cultural-Historical Psychology, and a leader of the Vygotsky Circle, also known as “Vygotsky-Luria Circle”. Apart from his work with Vygotsky, Luria is widely known for two extraordinary psychological case studies: The Mind of a Mnemonist, about Solomon Shereshevsky, who had highly advanced memory; and The Man with a Shattered World, about Lev Zasetsky, a man with a severe traumatic brain injury.

During his career Luria worked in a wide range of scientific fields at such institutions as the Academy of Communist Education (1920-1930s), Experimental Defectological Institute (1920-1930s, 1950-1960s, both in Moscow), Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy (Kharkiv, early 1930s), All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, and the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery (late 1930s). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Luria as the 69th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Chris Argyris

Chris Argyris (16 July 1923 to 16 November 2013) was an American (of Greek ancestry) business theorist and professor emeritus at Harvard Business School.

Argyris, like Richard Beckhard, Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis, is known as a co-founder of organisation development, and known for seminal work on learning organisations.

On This Day … 15 July [2022]

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Events

  • 1910 – In his book Clinical Psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin gives a name to Alzheimer’s disease, naming it after his colleague Alois Alzheimer.

People (Births)

  • 1904 – Rudolf Arnheim, German-American psychologist and author (d. 2007).
  • 1918 – Brenda Milner, English-Canadian neuropsychologist and academic.

People (Deaths)

  • 1940 – Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist and physician (b. 1857).

Emil Kraepelin

Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin (15 February 1856 to 07 October 1926) was a German psychiatrist.

H.J. Eysenck’s Encyclopaedia of Psychology identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics.

Kraepelin believed the chief origin of psychiatric disease to be biological and genetic malfunction. His theories dominated psychiatry at the start of the 20th century and, despite the later psychodynamic influence of Sigmund Freud and his disciples, enjoyed a revival at century’s end. While he proclaimed his own high clinical standards of gathering information “by means of expert analysis of individual cases”, he also drew on reported observations of officials not trained in psychiatry.

His textbooks do not contain detailed case histories of individuals but mosaic-like compilations of typical statements and behaviours from patients with a specific diagnosis. He has been described as “a scientific manager” and “a political operator”, who developed “a large-scale, clinically oriented, epidemiological research programme”.

Alois Alzheimer

Alois Alzheimer (14 June 1864 to 19 December 1915) was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist and a colleague of Emil Kraepelin. Alzheimer is credited with identifying the first published case of “presenile dementia”, which Kraepelin would later identify as Alzheimer’s disease.

Rudolf Arnheim

Rudolf Arnheim (15 July 1904 to 09 June 2007) was a German-born writer, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist.

He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art. His magnum opus was his book Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). Other major books by Arnheim have included Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power of the Centre: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982). Art and Visual Perception was revised, enlarged and published as a new version in 1974, and it has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and America where he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. He has greatly influenced art history and psychology in America.

In Art and Visual Perception, Arnheim tries to use science to better understand art. In his later book Visual Thinking (1969), Arnheim critiqued the assumption that language goes before perception. For Arnheim, the only access to reality we have is through our senses. Arnheim argued that perception is strongly identified with thinking, and that artistic expression is another way of reasoning. In The Power of the Centre, Arnheim addressed the interaction of art and architecture on concentric and grid spatial patterns. He argued that form and content are indivisible, and that the patterns created by artists reveal the nature of human experience.

Brenda Milner

Brenda Milner CC GOQ FRS FRSC (née Langford; 15 July 1918) is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. As of 2005, she holds more than 20 honorary degrees and continues to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as “the founder of neuropsychology” and has proven to be an essential key in its development. She received the Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience, in 2009, and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, together with John O’Keefe, and Marcus E. Raichle, in 2014. She turned 100 in July 2018 and at the time was still overseeing the work of researchers.

Eugen Bleuler

Paul Eugen Bleuler (30 April 1857 to 15 July 1939) was a Swiss psychiatrist and humanist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness.

He coined several psychiatric terms including “schizophrenia”, “schizoid”, “autism”, depth psychology and what Sigmund Freud called “Bleuler’s happily chosen term ambivalence”.

On This Day … 12 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1947 – Richard C. McCarty, American psychologist and academic.
  • 1959 – Karl J. Friston, English psychiatrist and neuroscientist.

Richard C. McCarty

Richard C. McCarty (born 12 July 1947) is a professor of psychology and the former provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Prior to serving as provost, he was dean of Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science.

McCarty grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia, and earned both his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees from Old Dominion University. He earned his Ph.D. in pathobiology from what is now the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland in 1976.

McCarty began his career at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he worked as a research associate in pharmacology. He also served as a lieutenant commander in the US Public Health Service. In 1978, he was appointed assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he remained until 1998. During his time at Virginia, he served as chair of the Department of Psychology from 1990-1998.

In 1998, McCarty was named Executive Director for Science at the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C., where he helped the APA launch the “Decade of Behaviour”. The Decade of Behaviour, a nickname for the 2000s and successor to the 1990s’ “Decade of the Brain”, was a public education campaign – endorsed by more than 70 professional associations across a variety of disciplines – to bring attention to the importance of behavioural and social science research. McCarty also spent time visiting universities and regional psychological associations to discuss how the APA might better represent psychologists nationally.

Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science named McCarty as its new dean in 2001. In addition to his decanal duties, McCarty taught a psychology seminar for first-year undergraduate students entitled “Stress, Health, and Behaviour” and had a dual appointment in the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine. On 06 May 2008, McCarty was elevated to the university provostship, replacing Nicholas S. Zeppos, who was himself elevated to the university chancery. McCarty stepped down from the position of provost on 30 June 2014; he joined the Vanderbilt Psychology Department faculty after a yearlong leave.

Much of McCarty’s research has centred on behavioural and physiological adaptations to stress, and he has written more than 30 chapters and 150 articles for various publications. In addition, McCarty served as the editor of American Psychologist and was the founding editor-in-chief of Stress. In 2020, his monograph, Stress and Mental Disorders: Insights From Animal Models, was published by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a textbook, Stress, Health, and Disease, which is under contract with Guilford Press and has an expected publication date of 2022.

Karl J. Frsiton

Karl John Friston FRS, FMedSci, FRSB, is a British neuroscientist at University College London and an authority on brain imaging. He gained reputation as the main proponent of the free energy principle, active inference and predictive coding theory.

On This Day … 11 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1943 – Howard Gardner, American psychologist and academic.

Howard Gardner

Howard Earl Gardner (born 11 July 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is currently the senior director of Harvard Project Zero, and since 1995, he has been the co-director of The Good Project.

Gardner has written hundreds of research articles and thirty books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, as outlined in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

Gardner retired from teaching in 2019. In 2020, he published his intellectual memoir A Synthesizing Mind.