Dr. H. Richard Lamb, a cherished member of the Treatment Advocacy Center board of directors and unparalleled psychiatrist, passed away in Southern California following an illness.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of Dr. Lamb’s work on America’s mental illness policy. He was one of the most influential psychiatrists addressing the nexus of mental illness and criminal justice in the world; his work on deinstitutionalization and the criminalization of mental illness shaped public policy conversations for decades and continues to influence policy decisions throughout the nation.
Dr. Lamb received his medical degree and psychiatric residency training from Yale University. He was director of psychiatric rehabilitation services for California’s San Mateo County Mental Health Services from 1964 to 1976. Dr. Lamb became Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine in 1976, a post he held until 2006 when he became Professor Emeritus. His numerous publications include: 6 books, more than 50 book chapters and over 150 peer-reviewed articles.
In the 1970s, Dr. Lamb was the first to document the substandard living conditions of those who had spent years in state hospitals and were trying to re-integrate themselves into society. In the 1980s, he published numerous prominent studies and articles on the imprisonment of the mentally ill and served as the chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force on the Homeless Mentally Ill. In 1998, the American Psychiatric Association awarded Dr. Lamb with the Arnold L. van Ameringen Award in Psychiatric Rehabilitation to honor his efforts advocating for people with severe mental illness and his extensive contributions to research on the subject. He was also the recipient of the 2003 Don and Peggy Richardson Memorial Award for Distinguished Service to Persons Afflicted with Serious Mental Illness from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an organization he helped found.
Dr. Lamb also generously lent his intellectual might to the Treatment Advocacy Center and its research, joining our board in 2009. During that time, he co-authored numerous reports, including some of the organization’s most widely known work addressing the loss of psychiatric treatment beds and the overrepresentation of people with mental illness in jails and prisons. His most recent contribution, in January of this year, questioned the National Institute of Mental Health’s reduction in clinical trials for schizophrenia.
Dr. Lamb’s 2011 commentary in the Journal American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law with frequent partner Dr. Linda Weinberger aptly sums up the philosophies that underpinned his work, “the mental health system should stem the tide of criminalization by taking back the responsibility of caring for persons with serious mental illness who are the most disabled and difficult to treat and by not relinquishing their time-honored obligation to treat this population.”