In Remembrance: Dr. Herbert Pardes, July 7, 1934 - April 30, 2024

Herbert Pardes, M.D., president of the BBRF Scientific Council since its inception, died on April 30, 2024 at his home in New York City. He was 89. In 1987, Dr. Pardes was among the small group of patient advocates and physicians who founded the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD), renamed the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation in 2011.

Trained as a psychiatrist, Dr. Pardes served as President and Chief Executive Officer of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System from 2000 through 2011. Subsequently he was Executive Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the hospital. Under his leadership, NewYork-Presbyterian became one of the premier hospitals and comprehensive healthcare institutions in the United States.

Dr. Pardes was an outspoken advocate for mental health, academic medicine, medical research, education, children, access to care, humanism and empathy in care delivery, and information and genomic technology in medicine. He chaired psychiatry departments at three institutions: Downstate (New York) Medical Center, the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Between 1978 and 1984, during the presidential administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Dr. Pardes was Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the United States Assistant Surgeon General. He had the opportunity to head the nation’s mental health agency at a time when it was vital to define for the first time the true prevalence of mental illnesses in society; to understand the extent and impact of mental and physical comorbidities; and to respond to the looming crisis of those with severe and often untreated serious mental illness. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of research in a dawning era of biological psychiatry deeply informed by neuroscience.

In 1989-90 Dr. Pardes was President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). He served on some fifteen editorial boards and as board member and consultant to many not-for-profit organizations and committees. He served on commissions related to health policy appointed by Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, including the Presidential Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Healthcare Industry and the Commission on Systemic Interoperability. He also served as Chairman of the Greater New York Hospital Association, the Hospital Association of New York, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the New York Association of Medical Schools.

RAPID ASCENT

Dr. Pardes received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University, where he graduated summa cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He attended medical school at the Downstate Medical Center, where he graduated Alpha Omega Alpha. This was followed by a year of psychiatry residency training before he was drafted into the Army and appointed head of the Mental Health Center at Fort Meyer in Arlington, Virginia. He returned for the completion of his residency and undertook a fellowship in the Doctor of Medical Science program at the State University Center. From there he started a career in academic medicine at Downstate Medical Center as Assistant Professor. He rapidly rose to Chairman of that department and served in that role until 1975, when he moved to the University of Colorado to chair its psychiatry department.

Following his years of leadership at the NIMH, from 1989 to 2000 Dr. Pardes served he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Vice President for Health Sciences at Columbia University. As Vice President, he oversaw the School of Dentistry, the School of Nursing, and the Mailman School of Public Health, in addition to leading the medical school. During Dr. Pardes’ tenure, dramatic improvements were made in the medical center’s facilities, with the construction of new buildings focusing on technology, diabetes, and research, and development of a plan to build a new center dedicated to cancer research. In addition, he led efforts to build a new Psychiatric Institute Research Building (which was named for him), secure the naming and relocation of the Mailman School of Public Health, and oversaw the acquisition of space by the medical school in Health Sciences for dramatic expansion of educational and research space.

At Columbia, Dr. Pardes ushered in a new era of academic innovation. He established one of the first academic departments of informatics at a medical school in the country, and launched a fundraising effort for the Health Sciences which totaled approximately $1 billion during his 11-year term. He revised the curriculum to introduce clinical medicine earlier and to diversify the curriculum offerings to include a greater focus on the social and related aspects of medicine for medical students. He also played a central role in developing the Dementia Center and the Berrie Diabetes Center, and recruited some of the top minds in medicine and health science from around the country to the university.

After serving as Dean and Vice President at Columbia, he was asked to assume the leadership of the newly integrated NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System, one of the largest hospital systems in the world. Serving as President of NewYork- Presbyterian from 2000 to 2011, he led the recruitment of a vast number of top-notch hospital staff, clinicians and clinical scientists. These recruitments, along with close to $2 billion in philanthropic contributions over 11 years, enabled the hospital to dramatically increase the quality and variety of its programs, continue to recruit highly talented clinical and academic physicians, and change the tenor of the hospital to a far more patient-centered and personally responsive enterprise.

In his memoir, published earlier this year, Dr. Padres explained the immense challenge of bringing together two distinguished hospital systems (New York Hospital and Columbia- Presbyterian Hospital) and their 20,000 employees to work toward common goals. “We began in each instance by making a major commitment to excellence—improving not one thing or a few things, but many things. Big things. The more we improved, the more we found we were able to do. Excellence was institutionalized. It became contagious.”

Dr. Pardes stressed how hospital employees are always exposed to high risk and danger when on the job, and how, fundamentally, those who choose this line of work do so, nearly always, because they care about other people. Healthcare jobs carry immense responsibility, and perfection is the standard against which one is judged. Yet, he noted, “we live in a time when trust in hospitals and healthcare personnel, including the most accomplished doctors and nurses, is appallingly low.” In this sense, he said, his memoir was “offered as a corrective—a reminder of what is right about medicine, and about how its excellence helps define what is best about our society.”

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHIATRY AND MENTAL HEALTH

Dr. Pardes played a major role in many aspects of psychiatric care, education, and research. He served as Chair of the American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry, and worked to advance collaboration between citizen’s advocacy groups and providers, activity that led to the formation of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in 1979 and NARSAD in 1987. (Dr. Pardes tells of the founding of NARSAD/BBRF in an excerpt of his memoir, which follows on page 14.) He also served as head of the Scientific Review Committee of Autism Speaks; was Vice Chair of the Human Genome Center in New York City; and Chair of the Lieber Institute for psychiatric research, affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.

His involvement with the founding of the Lieber Institute was one of many endeavors in which Dr. Pardes joined hands with the Lieber family. BBRF was their original and perhaps most endearing collaboration. Steve Lieber, BBRF’s late Board Chairman, and the late Connie Lieber, who led NARSAD and BBRF for over 20 years, were among his closest friends and confidantes. He spoke effusively about them and often remarked on how his life was deeply affected following their loss. “Connie and Steve, whom I miss terribly, were the most selfless, wise, and generous leaders I encountered in all my years in mental health,” he wrote.

Dr. Pardes was a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the United States Army Commendation Medal. He is also a recipient of the Sarnat International Prize for leadership in the field of mental health, and is the first recipient of the annual prize awarded by BBRF in his name, The Pardes Humanitarian Prize in Mental Health. The Pardes Prize recognizes a physician, scientist, public citizen or organization whose extraordinary contribution has made a profound impact on advancing the understanding of mental health and providing hope and healing for people who are living with mental illness.

In his memoir, Dr. Pardes above all stressed the compassion and humanitarian concern that he said were always, for him, at the heart of medicine. These were values that he traced back to his experience of serious illness, as a child of 7. Diagnosed with Perthes disease, he was placed in a nearly full-body cast for the better part of a year. He remembered being treated competently but coldly by doctors and nurses, and feeling great fear while alone at night in the hospital ward. Empathy for the patient and the patient’s family informed his approach as a psychiatrist and physician, but also as a leader of large healthcare institutions.

In a recent essay on how to improve healthcare in America, Dr. Pardes placed stress on integrating the care of “bodily” and “mental” illnesses, in this way “fully mainstreaming” the care of psychiatric disorders. He urged devoting particular attention to preventive care, especially for new mothers and their children. Citing decades of research performed by BBRF Scientific Council member Dr. Myrna Weissman and colleagues, he noted the immense benefit to be gained in treating new mothers with depression and other psychiatric problems, a practice that Dr. Weissman and others have shown to prevent or significantly reduce the occurrence of behavioral problems in their children. Dr. Pardes also devoted considerable attention to a problem he and colleagues worked hard to address during his tenure at the NIMH: how to compassionately and much more effectively treat individuals with serious, disabling mental illnesses including chronic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. He took pride in the Mental Health Systems Act, legislation passed at the end of the Carter presidency designed to provide more and better care for the seriously mentally ill, among others. The law was repealed early in the administration of President Reagan, one of several reversals in mental health policy whose deleterious impacts Dr. Pardes worked vigorously and effectively to lessen. Tragically, he noted, his team was not able to secure restoration of federal support for community mental health, which he suggests is one of the roots of the crisis we have faced ever since in caring for people with serious mental illnesses.

The plight of those with chronic, serious mental illness is informed by another historic phenomenon in which Dr. Pardes was both witness and participant: the response of medical and political institutions to the emptying of the state asylums—“deinstitutionalization”—as it gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. During these years he was both a deeply committed participant and caregiver, who helped to found a community mental health center in the underserved community of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Offering thoughts on how to “navigate out of the crisis” today facing those disabled by serious mental illness—especially the 100,000 or more who are not receiving sufficient care and not likely for a variety of reasons to be rehabilitated—Dr. Pardes wrote: “Is it possible that we as a nation—mighty and rich beyond the imagination of our Founders—lack the means to properly care for the most vulnerable among us?” He rejected that notion. “What has been missing over these last 40 years is the will to act. This means, really, the will to pay for better outcomes. If we believe that it is important to treat the most vulnerable mentally ill, particularly those who need special help staying on medications and finding stability in society, as well as those who are so sick that institutional care is required for the sake of their own safety and the public’s, then we have to be willing to pay the price.” He felt that good and decent societies are those whose members are willing to address the problems faced by the least fortunate.

Dr. Pardes and his late wife, Judith, had three sons, Lawrence, Stephen, and James, who, with their wives, survive him along with six grandchildren. Also surviving him is his partner of many years, Dr. Nancy Wexler. She is an Albert Lasker Public Service Award winner, Columbia University professor, and a leader of research efforts that culminated in the identification of the variant gene that gives rise to Huntington’s Disease (HD), as well as the genetic test and specialized genetic counseling that have been the result of Huntington's research.

Written By Peter Tarr, Ph.D.

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