Emeritus professor and wife endow community psychiatry chair
John and Ruby Schwab
Psychiatry professor emeritus Dr. John Schwab and his wife, Ruby, have pledged $1 million to endow a UofL chair in social, community and family psychiatry.
"There's a tremendous shortage of educational programs about families, family mental illness, emotional problems within families and how psychiatrists and other mental health workers can work most effectively with them," Schwab said.
"I hope that the person who occupies this chair will develop research tools for studying social, community and family factors in mental health," he continued. "I also hope they'll work on developing and establishing prevention programs."
A UofL medical school graduate, Schwab shifted his focus to psychiatry in 1961 after a career in physiology and internal medicine. During the 1970s he was involved in the development of Kentucky's statewide community mental health center program.
"We were seeing so many families with problems-problems with abuse, childcare, divorce, family disruption and instability," Schwab recalled. "I became really interested in family mental health."
He had obtained funding for large population studies of physical and mental health in Gainesville, Fla., where he was a psychiatry and medicine professor at the University of Florida, and later in Louisville, where he served as chairman of the psychiatry department for more than 18 years.
That research formed the basis of his 1992 book about evaluating mental health in families. A second book, "Family Functioning-the General Living Systems Research Model," has just been released.
Schwab, who grew up in Eastern Kentucky and was a high school pupil of Kentucky novelist-poet Jesse Stuart, was the first president of the American Association of Social Psychiatry.
His wife, Ruby, a Lawrenceburg, Ky., native, has been a co-author and editor of his books and articles and has been his faculty recruiting partner for more than 50 years.
"I feel strongly about what medicine has meant to me-that it has given me a purpose in life, enabled me to be of service to others, and made me a better human being," Schwab said.
"I am just one of the eight members of our family -- immediate and extended -- who graduated from the University of Louisville School of Medicine in the 20th Century.
"Ruby and I have a great desire to pay something back to the University of Louisville. Thank God it was here."
