Psychiatrist's Legacy Encourages Research by Residents in Military

Army psychiatrist, educator, and researcher Lt. Col. (Ret.) Kenneth Artiss created an award in 1983 to spur military psychiatry residents to conduct high-quality research.

Artiss taught and mentored psychiatry residents at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for more than 40 years before he died in 2001.

The award ceremony was held at Walter Reed last month at the end of a symposium in memory of Artiss.

Col. Stephen Cozza, M.C., was in the last class of psychiatry residents Artiss taught. He told Psychiatric News, “He was a great teacher and mentor. He had tremendous intellectual curiosity and always encouraged us to think independently.”

Artiss also got to know his residents informally by inviting them to dinners at his home in Rockville, Md., where they often had lively academic discussions, according to Emmanuel Cassimatis, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, Md. Cassimatis announced the recipients last month on behalf of the panel of judges, which consisted of five psychiatrists from Walter Reed or USUHS. They were charged with selecting the research papers that“ represented the best creative contribution to the field of psychiatry,” Cassimatis said.

He presented the 2004 Artiss Award to Air Force Capt. Monica Lovasz, whose research paper was titled “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Depression Two Years After the September 11 Attack.”

She examined the prevalence of these two disorders in Pentagon survivors two years after a commercial airplane commandeered by a terrorist crashed into a wing of the military complex, killing more than 100 people.

Lovasz found that 15 percent of the respondents met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and 7 percent met the diagnostic criteria for depression.

Cassimatis said the panel received several excellent research papers and decided to recognize three other psychiatry residents with certificates of achievement.

These are the titles and authors of those papers: