Education and Early Years
Spitzer was born in White Plains, New York in 1932. He received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Cornell University and his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine in 1957. Spitzer wrote an article on Wilhelm Reich's theories in 1953 which the American Journal of Psychiatry declined to publish.
Spitzer served on the four-person United States Steering Committee for the United States–United Kingdom Diagnostic Project, who published their results in 1972. (The most important difference between countries they found was that the concept of schizophrenia used in New York was much broader than the one used in London and included patients who would have been termed manic-depressive or bipolar.) Spitzer co-developed a computer program, Diagno I, in 1968, based on a logical decision tree, that could derive a diagnosis from the scores on a Psychiatric Status Schedule (which he co-published in 1970) and that the Project used to check the consistency of its results.
Spitzer codeveloped the Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ), a screening technique used for diagnosing bipolar disorder. He also codeveloped the Patient Health Questionnaire (PRIME-MD) which can be self-administered to find out if one has a mental illness.
Read more about this topic: Robert Spitzer (psychiatrist)
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education, early and/or years:
“Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches—enduring loneliness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“So cruel prison how could betide, alas,
As proud Windsor, Where I in lust and joy
With a king’s son my childish years did pass
In greater feast than Priam’s sons of Troy?
Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour;”
—Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)