Marie Nyswander

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marie Nyswander Robinson , born Mary Elizabeth Nyswander (born March 13, 1919 in Reno (Nevada) , † April 20, 1986 in New York City ) was an American psychiatrist and psychotherapist . Together with Vincent Dole, she is considered to be the founder of substitution therapy for opiate addicts (Methadone Maintenance Treatment, MMT).

Life

Marie Nyswander was the daughter of a mathematics professor and the well-known in the USA health educator Dorothy Bird Nyswander (1898-1998). The parents divorced shortly after the birth, and she grew up with her mother in Berkeley, Salt Lake City, and New York City. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and studied medicine at Cornell University , where she graduated in 1944. After trying unsuccessfully to serve as a surgeon in the US Navy during World War II, she went to a clinic for drug addicts in Lexington, Kentucky ( Lexington Narcotic Hospital ), where she learned about the coercive methods used to treat drug addicts were. She studied psychoanalysis at New York Medical College with the aim of helping drug addicts through psychotherapy, then practiced privately as a psychotherapist and doctor and was one of the founders of the Narcotic Addiction Research Project in New York in 1955. In 1956 her book The Drug Addict as a Patient was published , in which she portrayed drug addiction as a disease. In the 1950s and 1960s she looked after drug addicts jazz musicians in a clinic founded with Charles Winick and drug addicts as part of church projects.

In 1963 she began working with Vincent Dole at Rockefeller University , which led to the development of methadone- based therapy for heroin addicts. Nyswander was dissatisfied with the high relapse rate of the drug patients she treated and was looking for new forms of therapy. Dole approached the problem as part of basic scientific research, and had become aware of it through her book. The first drug addicts were treated with it in 1964. Both published their first results in the Journal of the American Medical Association, regarding heroin addiction as a metabolic disease.

She was married three times. First marriage briefly to an anatomy lecturer at Cornell University. In his second marriage from 1953 to the divorce in 1965 with the psychoanalyst Leonard Robinson and in the third marriage from 1965 with Vincent Dole.

In 1994 a street in Hamburg-Eidelstedt was named after her and a clinic at the Beth Israel Hospital. Since 1982 they have received the Nyswander-Dole Award from the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, with Nyswander and Dole as the first recipients. In 1978 both received the National Drug Abuse Conference award.

She also wrote a book on female sexuality, or frigidity , in which she advocated a traditional role for women in the family.

The jazz critic and liberal journalist Nat Hentoff wrote her biography in 1968.

Fonts

  • The unfulfilled woman. Nature, causes and treatment of female emotional coldness. Translated by Franz Klinger. Rüschlikon-Zurich [u. a.]: A. Müller, 1960.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ New York, Grune and Stratton
  2. ↑ Methadone, which was developed as a pain reliever in Germany during World War II, was also used to treat short-term patients in the drug clinic in Lexington, where Nyswander was, in the 1940s
  3. ^ Dole, Nyswander A medical treatment for diacetylmorphine (heroin) addiction. A clinical trial with methadone hydrochloride , Journal of the American Medical Association, Volume 193, 1965, pp. 646-650 (study with 22 patients). Other works: Dole, Nyswander, Mary Jeanne Kreek Narcotic blockade: a medical technique for stopping heroin use by addicts , Trans. Assoc. At the. Physicians, Volume 79, 1966; Pp. 122-136, Dole, Nyswander, Kreek Narcotic Blockade , Archives for Internal Medicine, Volume 118, 1966, p. 304, Dole, Nyswander, Alan Warner Successful treatment of 750 criminal addicts , Journal of the American Medical Association, Volume 206 , 1968, p. 2708, Dole, Nyswander Heroin addiction - a metabolic disease , Archives of Internal Medicine , Volume 120, 1967, p. 19
  4. ^ Marie Nyswander Robinson The power of sexual surrender , New American Library 1959. Published in German as The unfulfilled woman: Essence, cause and treatment of female emotional cold , A. Müller, Rüschlikon-Zurich, Vienna 1960, or in a new edition as The fulfilled woman : Happiness and harmony in love and marriage , Goldmann paperback 1966
  5. ^ Hentoff A Doctor Among the Addicts: The Story of Marie Nyswander , New York: Rand McNally , 1968
personal data
SURNAME Nyswander, Marie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Robinson, Marie Nyswander (married name); Nyswander, Mary Elizabeth (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychiatrist and psychotherapist
DATE OF BIRTH March 13, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Reno (Nevada)
DATE OF DEATH April 20, 1986
Place of death New York City