The psychiatrist who championed brain science

For most of the 20th century, mental illness was considered a product of personal weakness, sinful behavior, or poor parenting. Psychiatrists thought these problems were best addressed with psychoanalysis, and paid little attention to the actual functioning of the brain. Lewis Judd helped change their minds. As chair of the psychiatry department at the University of California, San Diego, and as director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1987 to 1990, Judd worked to educate the public and his profession about the biological basis of mental illness. Conditions such as depression and bipolar disorder were much like cancer and heart disease, he argued, and the key to their treatment lay in brain imaging, genetic analyses, and psychopharmaceuticals. “There was a lot of resistance,” he recalled in 2013. “Folks back then looked at mental illness as something people brought upon themselves, rather than as a disease based upon biology.”

Judd was born in Los Angeles to a homemaker mother and an obstetrician-gynecologist father, said The San Diego Union-Tribune. After earning degrees in psychology and medicine, “he served in the Air Force as a base psychiatrist” before joining UCLA’s psychiatry faculty. Judd’s “early research focused on phenylketonuria, a rare metabolic disease that can cause neurological problems,” said The Scientist. Those studies led him to ask whether other mental illnesses could also be a result of biological functions in the brain. If they were, he wondered, could they be treated with drugs? Judd soon became one of the nation’s top advocates for evidence-based psychiatry, and after being appointed department chair at UC San Diego in 1977, he helped make the college into a world leader in brain research.

He remained at the school until 2015, only stepping away to lead NIMH, said The New York Times. At the federal agency, the world’s largest source of funding for brain research, he launched the Decade of the Brain—an ambitious plan to map all the elements of brain function. Today, “much about the organ remains elusive,” but scientists credit him with moving his profession away from the “art” of Freud’s and Jung’s talk therapies. “The thing I’m most proud of,” he said in 2013, “is how psychiatry is becoming increasingly recognized as a real biomedical science.”

Times.