Harold Benjamin, 80; Pioneered Cancer Patient Support

Harold Benjamin, who gave up a successful Beverly Hills law practice after his wife was treated for breast cancer to found the Wellness Community, a groundbreaking network of support centers for cancer patients and their families, died Thursday afternoon at his home in Marina del Rey of complications from pulmonary fibrosis. He was 80.

Benjamin created the first Wellness Community -- a homelike center that offered emotional support groups, educational and relaxation workshops, even joke-fests for people with cancer -- in Santa Monica in 1982. His concept -- to turn cancer “victims” into their own advocates, reduce despair and enhance the possibility of recovery -- filled a void in the treatment world and became a model emulated around the world.

The Wellness Community now has 22 centers in the United States and two abroad, in Tokyo and Tel Aviv, all staffed by licensed professionals whose services are provided free. It has trained scores of therapists and others who have opened similar programs across the country, such as Gilda’s Club, named for the late “Saturday Night Live” comedian Gilda Radner, who wrote glowingly of her own experiences at the Wellness Community before losing her struggle with ovarian cancer in 1989.

“The Wellness Community is one of the truly great models of psychosocial support for cancer patients that emerged over the last quarter century,” said Michael Lerner, president and founder of Commonweal, a nonprofit institute in Bolinas, Calif., that runs a nationally recognized retreat for cancer patients.

“What Harold did,” Lerner said, “was organize a replicable national model.... Nobody, to my knowledge, has done such a comprehensive job for all cancer patients. That was his signal contribution to the field.”

When Benjamin launched the Wellness Community, it was viewed with some skepticism because there was no mainstream consensus that cancer patients needed or would benefit from the types of programs he envisioned. Most of the research showing that psychosocial support can help prolong the life of cancer patients came later, said Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, who knew Benjamin for many years.

“One of the worst things that can happen to you if you have cancer is to be isolated from your fellow human beings,” Whybrow said. “When Harold started this, if someone said they had cancer, everyone ran away from them. This was something Harold took exception to, and he ran in the other direction” to embrace those with cancer and help them mobilize their inner resources to work effectively with doctors against the disease.

Whybrow described Benjamin as “an extraordinary thinker who always managed to see things a little differently from others” and who possessed the vision and energy to “engage people and bring them to the cause.”

Benjamin was born in Philadelphia on April 19, 1924, the youngest of three children of shopkeepers. After serving in the Army as a radarman during World War II, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State in 1947. He married a fellow Penn State student, Harriet Miller, who supported him through law school at Cornell. He began his practice in New York, where his two children, Ann and Lauren, were born.

He later moved to Los Angeles and practiced real estate law in Beverly Hills, but other experiences eventually led him down a different path.

In the 1960s, he was involved at an administrative level with Synanon, the controversial drug rehabilitation program in Santa Monica founded by Charles Dederich. His work there as a “straight” or non-drug-user convinced him of the benefits of community-based therapy programs.

Then, in 1972, his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a bilateral mastectomy. Harriet Benjamin was determined, she wrote years later, to “fight for my recovery and not be passive in the face of adversity.” She educated herself so that she could “be partners with my medical team” and overcome the disease.

After his wife’s recovery, Benjamin decided that “for some reason, it was very important to me that as many people as possible recover from cancer to the greatest extent possible, and I thought I could help,” he wrote in his 1995 book, “The Wellness Community Guide to Fighting for Recovery From Cancer.” “And although I can’t explain why, I was anxious to devote all my efforts to that undertaking.”

He left Synanon after five years and began an exploration of the mind-body connection with Norman Cousins, the Saturday Review editor who, after experiencing a life-threatening illness, had become a champion of the power of positive thought on physical health. Benjamin also joined the Center for the Healing Arts, one of the earliest holistic health centers in the country, where he met others interested in what were then considered alternative therapies for diseases such as cancer.

One day he was driving along Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills and, as he approached his office, “he had this epiphany,” said Mitch Golant, the Wellness Community’s vice president for research and development, recalling a story that Benjamin often told. He conceived in that instant the idea of a support center that would help cancer patients assume an active role in their recovery. He called the concept “Patient Active” and hired as his program director a cancer survivor who was also a psychotherapist.

Donating $250,000 of his own money, he launched the center in an old yellow house on 5th Street in Santa Monica in mid-1982. It raised eyebrows because, he told The Times in a 1988 interview, “nobody really believed we weren’t going to charge anything. They couldn’t believe I was not going to get paid. And they couldn’t believe we weren’t going to make any money on it.”

After six months, Cousins, whose 1979 bestseller “Anatomy of an Illness” had chronicled the therapeutic benefits of laughter, became honorary chairman of the board.

Within two years, interest was so strong that the center was running 25 support groups a week. In 1988, with a $1-million donation from a local philanthropist, Benjamin established a training institute. Wellness Community centers opened in Redondo Beach, San Diego and Knoxville, Tenn.

The major expansion began after Radner devoted a chapter of her 1989 autobiography, “It’s Always Something,” to her experiences at the Wellness Community in Santa Monica. She was reluctant to participate at first. But shortly after joining a support group, she was hooked. She began to revel in the stories of cancer survivors whose will to live was inspirational.

“I stopped sitting at home saying, ‘Why me?’ or being depressed thinking I was the only one,” she wrote. “I began to crawl to the Wellness Community like someone in search of an oasis in the desert. My car couldn’t get me there fast enough. I couldn’t walk fast enough from the parking lot. I couldn’t get inside fast enough to be nourished by other cancer patients, and to know I was not alone. I could hire people to be around me, I could pay groups of people to come and go through this with me, but I could never buy what I got there, not ever.”

The Wellness Community now serves 30,000 people a year at its facilities. Along with AIDS and gene splicing, it was heralded in an exhibit at Disney’s Epcot Center in Florida as one of three transforming events in the health field in the latter part of the 20th century.

Dr. Jimmie Holland, retired chief of psychiatry at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, called Benjamin a pioneer who “led the way to show ... the value of having a place for patients to go which was theirs and devoted to psychosocial support.”

“Those of us who were there with Hal in the 1980s,” she added, “and who have seen the improvement in psychosocial services -- still woefully inadequate, but far better -- know how much we owe Hal for leading the way.”

In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by a grandson and two great-grandchildren.

His family requests donations to the Harold and Harriet Benjamin Building Fund, the Wellness Community-West Los Angeles, 2716 Ocean Park Blvd., No. 1040, Santa Monica, CA 90405.

Burial will be private. Plans are being made for a public memorial in January.