Klerman, Gerald L.

   (1928–1992)

   The epidemiology of depression and the description of a new form of psychotherapy represent the major achievements of "Jerry" Klerman, the consummate psychiatric insider. Born in New York City, Klerman graduated with an M.D. from New York University in 1954 and trained in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston in the glory days of psychoanalysis. From 1959 to 1961, Klerman worked as Jonathan Cole’s (1925–) assistant in the Psychopharmacology Service Center of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), then returned to Harvard as an instructor in psychiatry. In 1965, he joined the department of psychiatry of Yale University as an assistant professor, and in that year he and Cole showed in a paper in Pharmacological Reviews that imipramine did indeed have a therapeutic effect in depression. From 1970 to 1977, Klerman was professor of psychiatry at Harvard, then after a brief stretch as an administrator at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, he returned to Harvard from 1980 to 1985 as director of the Stanley Cobb Research Laboratories at the Massachusetts General Hospital. From 1985 until his death from diabetes, he was professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College in New York (at the Payne Whitney Clinic). Also, from 1972 on, he headed the NIMH collaborative program on the psychobiology of depression, a large longitudinal study that concluded the incidence of depression was increasing. He also launched in 1977 the epidemiologic catchment area study, the results of which appeared in 1991 in a volume edited by Lee Robins (St. Louis school). Beginning in 1974, he and his wife, epidemiologist Myrna Weissman, together with several others, described the "interpersonal" system of the psychotherapy of depression: a "brief, focused, specific strategy," as per the subtitle of the book (1984) that emerged at the end of their project. (See PSYCHOTHERAPY: interpersonal psychotherapy [from 1967].) In 1982, he became the leader of a major study of the drug alprazolam (Xanax), funded by the Upjohn company and described by his obituarist psychiatrist Martin Keller (1946–) of Brown University as "the largest multinational, multicenter controlled clinical trial in the history of psychiatry." (See Benzodiazepines.)