‘Top shrink’ counseled key U.S. officials
Bertram S.Brown led National Institute of Mental Health
Bertram S. Brown, a psychiatrist who led the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1970s and was once labeled the country’s “top shrink” for helping senior government leaders through professional and personal problems, such as anxiety and depression, died May 14 at an assisted-living center in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. He was 89.
The cause was cardiovascular disease, his daughter Wendy Brown-Blau said.
For many in the federal government, Brown’s name was synonymous with mental health care. He worked at the NIMH for 17 years, beginning in 1960 as a psychiatrist and culminating in his service as director from 1970 to 1977.
Over five presidential administrations, he oversaw the national transition of mental health care from large, staterun institutions to community-based mental health-care centers. He was credited with helping expand the number of drug-abuse treatment facilities across the country and with creating partnerships with the Bureau of Prisons and other federal agencies to provide psychiatric-service programs.
Brown also provided free confidential therapy sessions for White House Cabinet secretaries, senior aides, members of Congress and military leaders in what he called “curbstone” service, a reference to the quick conversational exchanges between doctor and client.
His dismissal in 1977 was unceremoniously public, with Joseph Califano Jr., then the secretary of health, education and welfare, firing Brown and the heads of several other medical institutes as part of a leadership shake-up seeking “new blood” at the top.
“He’s a first-class man and he’s done a first-class job,” Califano said of Brown at the time. “I have no criticism of the job he has done or anything else. It is my policy that it’s for the good of the government and the good of individuals for us to turn over these posts when people have been in them for a number of years.”
Brown became a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and worked as a senior psychiatrist at the Rand Corp. He was president and chief executive of Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia from 1983 until his retirement in 1987.
Bertram Brown was born in the New York borough of Brooklyn on Jan. 28, 1931. According to his daughter, he was given the middle initial “S” at birth but not a middle name. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and his father worked as a furrier.
Encouraged by his parents, he trained as a classical pianist and attended the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan. He ultimately decided on a career in medicine, although he regularly played the piano throughout his life, occasionally at charity events.
He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1952 and Cornell University’s medical school in 1956. He received a master’s degree in public health from Harvard University in 1960 and that same year became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, rising to the rank of rear admiral.
His wife of 66 years, Joy Gilman, died in 2018. In addition to his daughter Wendy, of Haddonfield, N.J., survivors include two other daughters, Dale Susan Brown of Washington, D.C., and Laurie Browngoehl
of Bryn Mawr, Pa.; a sister; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In Washington, Brown became an authority on political psychiatry, focusing on individual leadership qualities, group dynamics, political strategy and tactics to achieve policy goals, especially when it came to the occupier of the White House.
“The White House is a character crucible,” he was quoted saying in the 2009 book “In the President’s Secret Service” by former Post journalist Ronald Kessler. “Many of those who run crave superficial celebrity. They are hollow people who have no principles and simply want to be elected.
“Even if an individual is balanced,” he added, “once someone becomes president, how does one solve the conundrum of staying real and somewhat humble when one is surrounded by the most powerful office in the land, and from becoming overwhelmed by an at times pathological environment that treats you every day as an emperor? Here is where the true strength of the character of the person, not his past accomplishments, will determine whether his presidency ends in accomplishment or failure.”