June 30, 2001 marked the end of an era at Johns Hopkins. Paul R. McHugh retired after twenty-six years as Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychiatrist-in-Chief. During these twenty-six years, the department became one of the most highly regarded in the nation-- for its clinical excellence, its residency training, and its programs of research into the nature and origins of psychiatric disorders.

Paul was born and raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He is the son of a high school teacher and received both his undergraduate and medical education at Harvard University. He completed training in neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, then went on to complete psychiatric training at the Maudsley Hospital in London. He worked in neuroscience research at Walter Reed Hospital, then left to take a position on the faculty at Cornell. In 1967, he was appointed director of Cornell's Bourne Research Laboratory. Soon after, he was persuaded to take on the role of Clinical Director of the Westchester Division of the New York Hospital. It was there that his genius as a clinical teacher and radical thinker about psychiatry started to become evident. In the space of just a few years, he developed a residency program that attracted some of the brightest and the best into psychiatry, and he started to develop an approach which would years later be laid out for a wider audience in The Perspectives of Psychiatry.

In 1973, Paul was recruited to Portland to assume the chairmanship of psychiatry at the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center. In 1975, he returned to the East Coast to become the Henry Phipps Professor at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. McHugh’s achievements at Hopkins have been many. The department moved from the venerable, but outdated, Phipps Building to the bigger and better, Adolf Meyer Building in 1982. Clinical services expanded, students were educated, faculty careers developed, state-of-the-art research programs developed, millions of grant dollars were awarded, thousands of papers and dozens of books were published, and young psychiatrists were launched on distinguished careers across the country and around the world.

But this brief summary of the department’s achievement under Dr. McHugh’s leadership does not do justice to him, either in terms of his spirit, or his intellect. Paul has an unequaled ability to challenge and inspire those who work with him. He has an amazing ability to see to the heart of an issue; he takes a complex clinical or scientific problem and reduces it to its essential questions. He is a wonderful mentor who fosters high morale, even in the face of major challenges.

Paul has made important contributions in the physiology of motivation, and in neuropsychiatry. His greatest contribution, however, is his approach to psychiatry, which he and Phillip Slavney outlined in The Perspectives of Psychiatry. It is a deceptively slim book, now in its second edition, which has been translated into five other languages. This approach provides a logical and coherent framework for thinking about psychiatry and mental life. It does not attempt to impose any particular theoretical model, but shows how, in concept and in practice, different ways of thinking about psychiatric illness have distinct advantages.

In the past decade, Paul has been addressing a wider, national audience. He has tried to persuade American Psychiatry of the need for clear-headed and critical thinking about the nature of the problems that our patients confront, the methods we use to comprehend them and the way we treat them. Through his writings and public pronouncements, he has defended the integrity of psychiatry by exposing its errors. He has criticized some of the sacred cows of our field— psychoanalysis, deinstitutionalization, and DSM-IV among them. This has not always made him popular in the higher echelons of the psychiatric establishment.

Paul is known for his strong ethical and spiritual convictions. His loyalty to his colleagues and students is legendary, and he takes uncompromising stands on important ethical issues facing our profession and our nation. His public stand in opposition to the “Kevorkian Epidemic” is but one example. His vocal condemnation of the mistreatment of patients or their families by unskilled or misguided therapists is another.

Paul is not retiring from psychiatry—he is stepping down from the Henry Phipps Chair. Relieved of the demands of that office, he may spend more time with his grandchildren, but he is unlikely to be taking up painting with watercolors, or fishing. Paul will continue to write, to talk, to stimulate, to encourage, and to provoke for as long as he has breath to do it. He will always have the affection and respect of his students and colleagues who try--but never quite succeed-- to emulate his brilliance, incisiveness, and generosity in their own lives and work.