Lewis Judd, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and chair of the University of California, San Diego’s psychiatry department for 36 years, died on December 16. He was 88 years old.
Judd was known for his push to recognize mental illnesses as conditions rooted in neurobiological processes, rather than matters of will or choice. “He was obsessed with educating the public and the profession . . . that mental illnesses were biological illnesses, that schizophrenia and depression were diseases of the brain,” Alan Leshner, who worked for Judd at the NIMH, tells The Washington Post. “At the time, that was a heretical thought.”
Judd was born in Los Angeles in 1930. He studied psychology at the University of Utah before earning a medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he later joined the faculty. In 1970, he moved to the University of California, ...
