Sarnoff A. Mednick

Sarnoff A. Mednick

Professor Sarnoff Mednick, Ph.D., Dr. Med (honorary) pioneered the prospective high-risk longitudinal study to investigate the etiology (causes) psychopathology or mental disorders. His emphasis was on schizophrenia but he has also made significant contributions to the study of creativity, psychopathy, alcoholism, and suicide in schizophrenia. He is a Professor Emeritus at The University of Southern California where he has been a tenured professor since the early '70s and remains highly active though in his eighties. Dr. Mednick was the first scientist to revisit the genetic basis of mental disorders following the backlash against genetics following the era of eugenics. He was the recipient of the Joseph Zubin Award in 1996 and had over 300 peer-reviewed publications on the topic.

He received his Ph.D. at Northwestern University where was a student of Benton J. Underwood. Mednick began his career as a professor at Harvard University, then took a position at the University of Michigan where he was best known for his verbal learning experiments and other cross-sectional studies, and for his theorizing on creativity (also see the Remote Associates Test of creativity ), psychopathy, and schizophrenia. It was at the University of Michigan that he began to question his own methodology of cross-sectional studies (the popular methodology at the time) and to develop his rationale for the high-risk study, one of his greatest contributions to the field of psychology and psychiatry. He noted that many of the findings of differences between adult schizophrenics and normal controls that were published at the time were not replicated. Each study tended to use available control samples of convenience (such as the relatives of hospitalized persons with schizophrenia) and so turned out to be the result of the effects of individuals suffering the effects of life of schizophrenia. Elements effecting the outcome of these studies were poor diet, the side effects of medications, and psychosocial effects of hospitalization, all of which were associated with living with schizophrenia but that were not of etiological significance (but rather epiphenomenal). Although Mednick's work was highly celebrated in the early '60s and he continued to obtain National Institute of Mental Health funding, he decided to take a great risk by saving his NIMH money to launch a prospective longitudinal study which would be so difficult and expensive that his colleagues at the time thought it was chimerical. He, along with his student Thomas McNeil proposed, in a classic monograph, to study persons at risk for schizophrenia before they fell ill by studying children of women with schizophrenia who are sixteen more times likely to develop schizophrenia. While at the University of Michigan, he set up a study in Denmark (through an Institute he helped originate) because Denmark has a central mental health register, adoption register, death register, and various means of tracing subjects across generations. In addition, because it is a homogeneous and stable population, it is easy to trace subjects over time. His study, far from being chimerical, led to a number of critical discoveries in the field.