RARE “American Psychiatric Association” Winfred Overholser Hand Signed 3X5 Card For Sale
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RARE “American Psychiatric Association” Winfred Overholser Hand Signed 3X5 Card:
$499.99
Up for sale a RARE! "American Psychiatric Association" Winfred Overholser Hand Signed 3X5 Card.
ES-3950
Winfred Overholser (1892 – October
6, 1964) was an American psychiatrist, president of the American Psychiatric
Association, and for 25 years the superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a
federal institution for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in
1892, Winfred Overholser graduated from Harvard College in 1912 and received a medical degree
from Boston University in
1916.
He was Commissioner of the Massachusetts
Department of Mental Diseases and worked with the National
Committee for Mental Hygiene in New York.
In 1940, he and his colleague Harry Stack Sullivan, as
members of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Military
Mobilization, formulated guidelines for the psychological screening of
inductees to the United States military. He
campaigned for recognition of alcoholism as a mental disease, calling it in
1940 "the greatest public health problem which is not being scientifically
attacked. As early as 1941 he warned of the need to
consider the mental health of an aging population and said that old age
pensions could prove to be "one of the most important developments in the
prevention of mental breakdowns in later life."
He served as superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a federal
institution for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C., from 1937 to 1962. His
most famous patient there was Ezra Pound. In 1947, he agreed to move Pound to the more
pleasant surroundings of Chestnut Ward, close to his private quarters, which is
where he spent the next twelve years He was instrumental in Pound's release in 1958,
after reporting that there was a "strong probability" that criminal
insanity explained his crime and that "further confinement can serve no therapeutic
purpose." He also testified on behalf of Frank H. Schwable, a Marine who, while held prisoner by North
Korea, confessed to participating in germ warfare.
He served in 1948 as president of the American Psychiatric
Association. He was for a time the editor in chief of the Quarterly
Review of Psychiatry and Neurology. In 1949, he provided a pessimistic assessment
of the prospects for St. Elizabeth's patients who had been subject to
lobotomies. He told a professional conference: "I am sorry to say that
even when they are improved, they are still nothing to brag about. We are not
enthusiastic." Overholser
retired in 1962 after 25 years as superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital
where under his administration the hospital pioneered the use of "group
therapy, tranquillizing drugs and psychodrama."
He was also Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry of George
Washington University School of Medicine.
As Chairman of the American Psychiatric
Association, Overholser concluded that United States Secretary of
Defense James Forrestal "came
to his death by suicide while in a state of mental depression". Boston
University award him its alumni medal in 1962. He received as well the United States Selective Service Medal. France awarded him
its Legion of Honor and Medal of Liberation.
He died on October 6, 1964. His wife and three children survived him.
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