Weissman, Myrna

   (1935–)

   An investigator who shaped the field of psychiatric epidemiology, Weissman was born in Boston into the family of Samuel Milgram, a small businessman, and Jeanette Milgram, a housewife. With a master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania in 1958, she started out as a social worker at the clinical center of the National Institutes of Health, moving to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1967 to work at Yale’s clinical psychopharmacology research unit on the New Haven-Boston Collaborative Depression Research Project, led by Gerald Klerman. (See Psychotherapy: interpersonal therapy.) In 1974, she received a Ph.D. from Yale University in epidemiology and chronic diseases, and from 1975 to 1987 she served at Yale as professor of psychiatry and epidemiology. In 1987, she became professor of epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia University and chief of the department of clinical-genetic epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

   At Yale, she was principal investigator of research undertaken in 1975–1976 on the epidemiology of depression in New Haven, Connecticut, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1981. She led an epidemiological study of suicidal ideation in panic disorder, published in 1989 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the 1990s, Weissman was chief investigator of a large international study of the epidemiology of major depression and bipolar disorder, some results from which appeared in 1996 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As well, together with her late husband Gerald L. Klerman and others, she wrote A Comprehensive Guide to Interpersonal Psychotherapy, which appeared in 1984. Among her other books might be mentioned, with co-author British psychiatrist Eugene Paykel (1934–), The Depressed Woman: A Study of Social Relationships (1974).