NAMI Interview: Nancy Andreason
The truth is I’ve had one experience—and it’s 100 percent private—but it was not the trigger that gave me the passion I have. The trigger is the patients that I have seen and continue to see. Someone like Kay Jameson, and I myself, I think are pretty darn sane. My husband would say, “God seems to be trying you.” I’ve had a lot of personal tragedy, my first husband died from cancer, my oldest daughter just died from cancer. And, frankly, being a woman coming up through the medical school system in the 1960s and ‘70s because women were truly discriminated against then. My response is not depression, it’s what I call the “O-3 model:” outwork, outsmart and outlive them!
Dr. Andreasen served as editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Psychiatry for 13 years. She also served on the DSM-III and DSM-IVtask forces, developing the first widely used scales for rating the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Today, she is the director of the Psychiatry Iowa Neuroimaging Consortium at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Read more about Dr. Andreasen at nancyandreasen.com.