Dr. Wayne Fenton was as comfortable on the streets as he was in the lab; a sort of a Renaissance psychiatrist who bridged the gap between research, treatment and public policy. But over the Labor Day weekend, Wayne Fenton’s efforts to care for a critically ill young man went tragically awry. The eminent psychiatrist, deputy director for clinical affairs at the National Institute of Mental Health, was found beaten to death in his office. The patient, a bright, 19-year old college-bound ice hockey player, confessed to police and was charged with first-degree murder. In this special edition of The Infinite Mind, we’ll speak with the nation’s top mental health policy makers and advocates about the life and work of Dr. Wayne Fenton, hear an interview with Dr. Fenton himself about his work with seriously ill patients and his efforts to understand the nature of psychosis, and we'll try to make some sense of his death, a death that came in the line of duty. Host Dr. Fred Goodwin's guests include: Thomas Insel, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), who worked closely with Dr. Wayne Fenton for the past six years at NIMH, where Dr. Fenton helped develop new diagnostic tools and treatments for servere mental illnesses such as schizophrenia; Tom Bernard, Co-President and Co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics, who was a close friend of Wayne Fenton; and David L. Shern, Ph.D., the CEO and president of the National Mental Health Association, the nation’s oldest and largest mental health advocacy group. The program also includes excerpts from Lichtenstein Creative Media's Peabody Award-winning "Voices of an Illness" series, narrated by Jason Robards, that provides a window on the interaction between Dr. Fenton and one of his seriously ill patients, a young woman who had been suffering from schizophrenia; both Dr. Fenton and the patient, who had since recovered, explain what happened when she was first brought to Dr. Fenton's office while she was in a severely psychotic state. |
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