Israel Liberzon
Theophile Raphael Professor of Neuroscience; Professor
of Psychiatry and Psychology; Co-director,
Center for Trauma, Stress, and Anxiety,
University of Michigan
Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan
Diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry
and Neurology
Past President, Psychiatric Research Society (2003) COURTESY OF ISRAEL LIBERZONIsrael Liberzon discovered his natural proclivity for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) research when he arrived at the University of Michigan (UM) and Veterans Administration Ann Arbor Medical Center in the 1980s. There, he encountered numerous combat veterans with the condition. “The veterans tended not to like the doctors, who they thought couldn’t relate to them. It was always very natural and easy for me to relate to my veteran patients, to understand where they were coming from,” says Liberzon. “I didn’t have the barriers of communication that other clinicians had because I had the combat experience in common with the patients.”
Liberzon had served a mandatory three years in the Israeli Defense Forces starting at age 18. There, he trained as a combat paramedic and became part of an airborne unit, treating soldiers and civilians wounded in combat zones.
He says he feels fortunate to have made personal connections with such patients. Most that he treated in the UM VA system were Vietnam War veterans, but there were also older vets who’d served in World War II and the Korean War. “It was fascinating because they were experiencing things and dealing with things that were forty years old, and they still had a profound effect on their daily life,” Liberzon says. One of his most memorable patients had been a WWII pilot, who, on the way ...
