Norman Brill; Headed Development of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute
Dr. Norman Q. Brill, UCLA’s first chairman of psychiatry and the founding director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, has died at the age of 89.
Brill, who also had a long association with the Army and the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles, died April 8 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, university officials said.
He joined the UCLA School of Medicine faculty in 1953 and helped develop its psychiatry department into one of the largest in the world. During the 1950s, he also supervised planning for the state- and federal-funded institute that opened in 1961 and is now an internationally recognized clinical and research facility for mental health. Brill headed recruitment for the facility, created teaching programs and directed community relations.
“The hospital is not going to be a place where crazy people are locked up until they stop acting crazy, but a place where patients can voluntarily seek help,” he told a group of women shortly before the institute opened four decades ago.
“The objective [of the modern psychiatrist] is to help the patient understand the nature and source of his problem so he may better use his intelligence in dealing with it.”
After Brill stepped down as chairman of the UCLA psychiatry department and the Neuropsychiatric Institute in 1967, he continued to teach at UCLA until his retirement in 1979. During his Westwood tenure, he helped organize psychiatric units at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance and at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, where he worked from 1979 to 1989 as associate chief of staff for education.
“Dr. Brill laid the foundations for modern psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles,” said Dr. Gerald S. Levey, dean of the UCLA School of Medicine and provost of medical sciences. “In a profound way, a little of Norman Brill’s caring and compassion goes into the treatment of every psychiatric patient we see today.”
Brill began his long association with the military as an Army colonel during World War II, heading psychiatry at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and then as chief of psychiatry in the office of the surgeon general. He made important breakthroughs during that time in the study and continuing treatment of war-related psychosis, and remained a psychiatric consultant to the military throughout his career.
Born in New York City, Brill earned his degrees at the College of the City of New York, the New York University School of Medicine and the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute.
Early in his career, he practiced privately in New York and Washington, and for two years after the war headed the Georgetown University department of neurology in Washington.
During his years in Los Angeles, Brill did research on the expectations and disappointments of men and women concerning marriage, the effects of long-term marijuana use and the use of talk therapy instead of drugs for certain types of mental illness.
“Learning that drugs are as effective for some persons with some neurotic disorders as a one-hour session [with a therapist],” he told The Times in 1967, “has forced us to ask ourselves how all of these things work. Doctors like to feel it is what they do that counts, but the study indicates there is not much difference, regardless of what treatment he uses.”
The comment was based on a study that Brill and Dr. Ronald R. Koegler had done on 300 Neuropsychiatric Institute outpatients with personality disorders, psychosomatic illnesses and other problems. The doctors published their results in the book “Treatment of Psychiatric Outpatients.”
Brill is survived by his wife, Alice; two sons, Dr. James Brill of Denver and Dr. Peter Brill of Santa Barbara; a daughter, Mary Catherine Brill of Seattle; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
