Leon Eisenberg

A 2012 article in the German weekly publication Der Spiegel gives an account of an interview Eisenberg gave in 2009, seven months before his death. It quotes him as saying, "ADHD is a prime example of a fabricated disease... The genetic predisposition to ADHD is completely overrated." Instead of prescribing a 'pill', Eisenberg said, psychiatrists should determine whether there are psychosocial reasons that could lead to behavioral problems.

In mid-2009 (June 22, 2009), a Leon Eisenberg Chair in Child Psychiatry was named at Children's Hospital Boston. The first chairholder of the Leon Eisenberg Professorship in Child Psychiatry is David R. DeMaso, MD, HMS Professor of Psychiatry and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Children's Hospital Boston.

Leon Eisenberg died of prostate cancer at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 15, 2009.

Leon Eisenberg was proudest of the Diversity Lifetime Achievement Award he received in 2001 for his role in inaugurating affirmative action at HMS in 1968 and sustaining it as chairman of the Admissions Committee from 1969 to 1974. He regards that as his most important contribution to Harvard Medical School.

He and his wife, Carola B. Eisenberg, former dean of students, first at MIT, then at Harvard Medical School, had been active with Physicians for Human Rights, which as an organization that received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Kleinman A, Eisenberg L, Desjarlais R (Eds) (1995), World Mental Health: Priorities and Problems in Low-Income Countries. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eisenberg completed the first RCTs of psychiatric consultation to social agencies and of the utility of brief psychotherapy in anxiety disorders. He published a forceful critique of Konrad Lorenz's instinct theory and established the usefulness of distinguishing "disease" from "illness". He has highlighted the environmental context as a determinant of the phenotype emerging from a given genotype, and from the late 1990s through 2006, he had been involved with developing conferences and resources for medical educators in various specialties that would help them incorporate, into courses with their current and future students, the tidal wave of new information in genomics yet to puzzle future clinicians. This interest may have been encouraged by his stepson, Alan Guttmacher, then acting head of the National Human Genome Research Institute. For many decades, Leon Eisenberg had criticized psychoanalysis from a number of platforms.

He served as Chair of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Department of Child and adolescent psychiatry and Harvard Medical School until1988, when he retired. After retirement, he continued as The Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine, Psychiatry Emeritus, and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of the Harvard Medical School in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, until a few months before his death in 2009. He received both his BA and MD degrees from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught previously at both the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University. He was chief of psychiatry at both Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston during formative periods in psychiatry for each institution.

Former president of Case Institute of Technology (then Case-Western Reserve), Edward M. Hundert, while he was a medical student (class of 1984) at Harvard Medical School, played the part of Leon Eisenberg in the HMS Class Folies, in which (as his character) he sang the supposedly satirical but actually most complimentary tune, "I feel witty!"

Leon Eisenberg, completed the first outcome study of autistic children in adolescence, and recognized patterns of language use as the best predictor of prognosis. Of the two first studies of the outcome of infantile autism, he reported the American study in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1956, and the UK study was reported in JCPP shortly afterward by Victor Lotter and Sir Michael Rutter. Eisenberg also studied and identified the use of rapid return to school as the key treatment in the management of the separation anxiety in an underlying school phobia.

Leon Eisenberg (August 8, 1922 – September 15, 2009) was an American child psychiatrist, social psychiatrist and medical educator who "transformed child psychiatry by advocating research into developmental problems".