Past APA President Harold Eist, M.D., Dies

Past APA President Harold Eist, M.D., died December 16, 2021. He was 84. The cause of death was complications related to surgery, according to Ann Eist, his wife of 61 years.

Eist, who served as APA president for the 1996-1997 term, was elected on a wave of membership anger with managed care, which Eist castigated as destructive of patient care. Introducing Eist at the 1997 APA Annual Meeting in San Diego, then Medical Director Melvin Sabshin, M.D., described Eist as a “populist president whose intensity of care for our profession and for our individual members has never been exceeded; a president whose assertive passion about the threats to the practice of psychiatry has never been surpassed; and a president who has mobilized us, individually and collectively, to combat those threats with all the force we can muster.”

“The suffering of the mentally ill is being ignored, denied, and made invisible on the altar of managed care’s bottom line, and our patients know this,” wrote Eist in his February 7, 1997, presidential column in Psychiatric News. “This dehumanization is intolerable, and regardless of ‘contracts,’ we have to ask how physicians can participate in it?”

In addition to being president of APA, Eist served three separate terms (1981-1982, 1990-1991, and 2008-2009) as president of the Washington Psychiatric Society and a term as president of the Suburban Maryland Psychiatric Society. Always active in the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), Eist was a chair of the WPA Standing Committee to Review the Abuse and Misuse of Psychiatry. In that role, he was part of a delegation that met in 2004 with the Chinese Minister of Health and other Chinese officials around allegations that the Chinese used psychiatric hospitalization to punish members of the Falun Gong for their religious and cultural beliefs (Psychiatric News).

Eist completed his undergraduate and medical school training at the University of Alberta. He was trained in psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and completed his residency in 1967. It was at the University of Alberta that he met his future wife, who was getting a degree in social work. They married in 1960 while Eist was still in medical school.

At APA meetings and elsewhere, the two were inseparable. “They are a true partnership, supporting each other in all areas of their lives, personal and professional,” Sabshin said in his 1997 speech. “Even his presidency has been a partnership effort.”

The Eists moved to Washington, D.C., in 1967 when he was hired by the legendary Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Md. He was trained in psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. He was also hired as medical director of the fledgling District of Columbia Institute of Mental Hygiene. That clinic—with a staff of five and 18 patients—grew under his leadership to a staff of 150 professionals treating more than 2,500 patients a year at three sites. The clinic was a major part of Eist’s life for 22 years.

In addition to his work at the clinic, Eist maintained a private practice in Bethesda, Md., and was a professor of psychiatry at Howard University School of Medicine and clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Mrs. Eist recalled telling her husband once that maybe he should cut back on working six days a week. He responded, “This is what keeps me going, working for my patients.”

He was recipient of the NAMI Exemplary Psychiatrist Award and the WPA’s Leader in World Psychiatry Award. He was also awarded the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Award of the Washington School of Psychiatry for his efforts to bring psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment to poor and underserved individuals. And he received the Jack Greenspan Award from the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society for “his efforts to preserve, protect, and defend the practice and profession of psychiatry.” In 2015, the University of Alberta honored Eist with its Distinguished Alumni Award. In addition to Mrs. Eist, Eist is survived by their three children and four grandchildren. ■