Armando
Favazza, M.D.
I grew up in an Italian neighborhood in
Brooklyn
,
New York
, that bordered on a large Hasidic community.
At
Xavier
High School
in
Manhattan
(run by the Jesuits and the US Army!)
I was able to enroll in the Greek Honors curriculum (lots of
Latin, Greek, and French with a minimum of science) which was
“designed for students interested in becoming either a priest or a
physician.” I then
attended
Columbia
University
where I was fortunate to study with Margaret Mead.
I still have a copy of her final exam, which contained only one
item: Ask yourself a
question based on what you have learned in the class, and then answer
it. I wrote about Balinese
death rituals and received a B+ which was pretty good, considering it
was a graduate anthropology course.
While at
Columbia
, I was editor of Jester (which was much better than the Harvard Lampoon)
and founded The National Pre-Medical Journal which was circulated to
every pre-med student in the nation.
At
Columbia
I read a lot about people called Protestants, but I never really met
any, so I went to medical school at the
University
of
Virginia
. There I discovered that
some Protestants were really nice people and some weren’t.
I became friends with the Dept of Psychiatry Chairman, Ian
Stevenson, whose major interest was reincarnation, and with Wilfred
Abse, a psychoanalyst. I
published two papers, as well as a chapter on Fellini, the Italian film
maker, in the book Man and the Movies.
My residency in psychiatry was at the
University
of
Michigan
, which was a heavily psychoanalytic program.
Hard to believe but I got into trouble by allying myself with the
vibrant emerging community mental health faculty and even received my
MPH degree in community mental health, under the tutelage of Tsung-Yi
Lin and Phil Margolis. Some
of the psychoanalytic faculty were enraged when I wrote my first book; Guide
For Mental Health Workers (published by the U of Michigan press)
because they had never published a book.
Live and learn. I
also published four papers.
Then I went to
Oakland
(
California
)
Naval
Hospital
for my mandatory two years of active military duty.
My peer group was quite remarkable; all five became psychiatry
professors and two went on to become medical school deans.
In 1971 I took the American Board of Psychiatry and
Neurology exams in
St. Louis
and interviewed for a faculty job at several universities on my way back
home. At the first stop, the
University of Missouri-Columbia, I met with the Chairman, James Weiss.
We both got drunk and smoked Cuban cigars.
Jim offered me a job at the Associate Professor level if I would
publish six good papers. I
successfully completed this task and have been at
Missouri
ever since.
At the University of Missouri-Columbia, I took over
editorship of the Journal of Operational Psychiatry, which was
little more than a thin, in-house publication.
I soon turned it into the most widely circulated (40,000)
psychiatric journal in the world and published a lot of cultural
psychiatry articles, my favorite being “Sobriety in Black Hebrews.”
The Journal had a ten year run.
In 1978 I published the cover article
“Foundations of Cultural Psychiatry,” in the American Journal of
Psychiatry. It helped to
solidify cultural psychiatry as a bona fide academic area as opposed to
the semi-exotic, mainly single-case and touristy “transcultural
psychiatry.” It also
brought together a lot of colleagues; together we had a symposium on
cultural psychiatry in 1979 at the APA meeting. Previously, in 1977, Ed
Foulks, Joe Westermeyer, Ron Wintrob and I edited Current
Perspectives in Cultural Psychiatry.
This group, along with John Spiegel, co-founded the Society for
the Study of Psychiatry and Culture.
Margaret Mead died in 1978 and I was asked to write
the chapter she was working on for The Comprehensive Textbook of
Psychiatry. I wrote the
chapter for both the 1980 and 1985 editions and was promoted to
Professor of Psychiatry at Univ
Missouri
. Since the CTP rotates
authors, I just published the chapter, now titled “Cultural
Psychiatry,” for the 2005 edition.
In 1987 I wrote Bodies Under Siege:
Self-Mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry (a 2nd
edition in 1996 still sells 1000 copies a year) which was the first book
to utilize what I call the “cultural psychiatric approach” to
understand a problematic behavior. In
this approach I examine the biological, psychological, and social
factors that contribute to the behavior and examine these factors
through the overarching web of culture.
I have lectured on this topic more than 300 times, including at a
large number of the medical schools in the
USA
and
Canada
, and continue to make numerous radio, television, and print media
presentations on the subject.
Starting in the early 1990s I turned my attention
to religion and spirituality, although in 1982 I published another cover
article in the American Journal of Psychiatry titled “Modern
Christian Healing of Mental Illness.”
My book, PsychoBible: Behavior,
Religion, and the Holy Book came out in 2004 and is already in its
second printing. It received
the Creative Scholarship Award from the Society for the Study of
Psychiatry and Culture and I was especially pleased that David Kinzie,
Goffredo Bartocci, Ezra Griffith and many others regarded my magnum opus
so favorably.
I am heavily engaged in patient care and teaching
cultural psychiatry at my university.
Since it took me 10 years to write my best books, I hope to live
long enough to complete another one.
The topic is uncertain, but I hope it would be a Falstaffian
send-off to a rewarding career. Reviewers
have been kind enough to call Bodies Under Siege and PsychoBible
“classics.” God only
knows what they will call my next project.
January 23, 2008
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