Alfred Freedman, a Leader in Psychiatry, Dies at 94

 

The cause was complications of surgery to treat a fractured hip, his son Dan said.

In 1972, with pressure mounting from gay rights groups and from an increasing number of psychiatrists to destigmatize homosexuality, Dr. Freedman was elected president of the association, which he later described as a conservative “old boys’ club.” Its 20,000 members were deeply divided about its policy on homosexuality, which its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders II classified as a “sexual deviation” in the same class as fetishism, voyeurism, pedophilia and exhibitionism.

Well known as the chairman of the department of psychiatry at New York Medical College and a strong proponent of community-oriented psychiatric and social services, Dr. Freedman was approached by a group of young reformers, the Committee of Concerned Psychiatrists, who persuaded him to run as a petition candidate for the presidency of the psychiatric association.

Dr. Freedman, much to his surprise, won what may have been the first contested election in the organization’s history — by 3 votes out of more than 9,000 cast. Immediately on taking office, he threw his support behind a resolution, drafted by Robert L. Spitzer of Columbia University, to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders.

On Dec. 15, 1973, the board of trustees, many of them newly elected younger psychiatrists, voted 13 to 0, with two abstentions, in favor of the resolution, which stated that “by itself, homosexuality does not meet the criteria for being a psychiatric disorder.”

It went on: “We will no longer insist on a label of sickness for individuals who insist that they are well and demonstrate no generalized impairment in social effectiveness.”

The board stopped short of declaring homosexuality “a normal variant of human sexuality,” as the association’s task force on nomenclature had recommended.

The recently formed National Gay Task Force (now the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) hailed the resolution as “the greatest gay victory,” one that removed “the cornerstone of oppression for one-tenth of our population.” Among other things, the resolution helped reassure gay men and women in need of treatment for mental problems that doctors would not have any authorization to try to change their sexual orientation, or to identify homosexuality as the root cause of their difficulties.

An equally important companion resolution condemned discrimination against gays in such areas as housing and employment. In addition, it called on local, state and federal lawmakers to pass legislation guaranteeing gay citizens the same protections as other Americans, and to repeal all criminal statutes penalizing sex between consenting adults.

The resolution served as a model for professional and religious organizations that took similar positions in the years to come.

“It was a huge victory for a movement that in 1973 was young, small, very underfunded and had not yet had this kind of political validation,” said Sue Hyde, who organizes the annual conference of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “It is the single most important event in the history of what would become the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement.”

In a 2007 interview Dr. Freedman said, “I felt at the time that that decision was the most important thing we accomplished.”

Alfred Mordecai Freedman was born on Jan. 7, 1917, in Albany. He won scholarships to study at Cornell, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1937. He earned a medical degree from the University of Minnesota in 1941 but cut short his internship at Harlem Hospital to enlist in the Army Air Corps.

During World War II he served as a laboratory officer in Miami and chief of laboratories at the Air Corps hospital in Gulfport, Miss. He left the corps with the rank of major.

After doing research on neuropsychology with Harold E. Himwich at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, he became interested in the development of human cognition. He underwent training in general and child psychiatry and began a residency at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, where he became a senior child psychiatrist.

He was the chief psychiatrist in the pediatrics department at the Downstate College of Medicine of the State University of New York for five years before becoming the first full-time chairman of the department of psychiatry at New York Medical College, then in East Harlem and now in Valhalla, N.Y.

In his 30 years at the college he built the department into an important teaching institution with a large residency program. He greatly expanded the psychiatric services offered at nearby Metropolitan Hospital, which is affiliated with the school and where he was director of psychiatry.

To address social problems in East Harlem, Dr. Freedman created a treatment program for adult drug addicts at the hospital in 1959 and the next year established a similar program for adolescents. These were among the earliest drug addiction programs to be conducted by a medical school and to be based in a general hospital. He also founded a division of social and community psychiatry at the school to serve neighborhood residents.

With Harold I. Kaplan, he edited “Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry,” which became adopted as a standard text on its publication in 1967 and is now in its ninth edition.

During his one-year term as president of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Freedman made the misuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union one of the organization’s main issues. He challenged the Soviet government to answer charges that it routinely held political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, and he led a delegation of American psychiatrists to the Soviet Union to visit mental hospitals and confer with Soviet psychiatrists.

After retiring from New York Medical College, Dr. Freedman turned his attention to the role that psychiatry played in death penalty cases. With his colleague Abraham L. Halpern, he lobbied the American Medical Association to enforce the provision in its code of ethics barring physicians from taking part in executions, and he campaigned against the practice of using psychopharmacologic drugs on psychotic death-row prisoners so that they could be declared competent to be executed.

In addition to his son Dan, of Silver Spring, Md., he is survived by his wife, Marcia; another son, Paul, of Pelham, N.Y.; and three grandchildren.