Milton Greenblatt; Psychiatrist Studied LSD Influence on Patients

Milton Greenblatt, a psychiatrist who held academic appointments ranging from Harvard to UCLA and whose research included a controversial study of patients under the influence of LSD, has died.

His wife, Margaret, said Greenblatt was 80 when he died Thursday in a Ventura hospital of congestive heart failure. The family had moved to Ventura after living in Sherman Oaks for several years.

Greenblatt’s history in the mental health field dated to the primitive days when controversial drugs were administered to unwilling patients who had had their shoes removed to prevent them being used as weapons. During the 1970s and 1980s he had been director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute hospital and chief psychiatrist at Olive View Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley.

Before that he taught at Harvard and Boston universities and after moving West became director of psychiatry at the Sepulveda Veterans Hospital near UCLA.

In 1981 he co-authored a report that grew out of a study of 1,000 veterans who complained of substandard and inadequate care at veterans hospitals. Many of their complaints were justified, he found.

His research ranged from lobotomies to schizophrenia to alcoholism.

In the 1950s he oversaw a program at what was then Boston Psychopathic Hospital, in which mentally ill patients were given LSD to see if it improved their condition. The project became known nationally when one of the patients hanged herself.

In addition to his wife, Greenblatt is survived by two sons, three grandsons and a great-granddaughter.