Judith L. Rapoport

Judy Rapoport was a physician who did research in child psychiatry for a large part of her career at the National Institutes of Mental Health, NIMH, in Bethesda, Maryland. She and her husband, Stanley, also a physician whom she met at Harvard Medical School, lived for more than 50 years in a lovely house near American University in Washington, DC where they raised their two sons, Erik, and Stuart.

Judy and her older sister Leda grew up on the West side of Manhattan. She attended the Walden School and savored the intense cultural life and freedom of the city. She spent summers in Westport Connecticut with friends and family, swimming, playing tennis and just talking. She played folk songs on her guitar and sang in choruses. Her mother Minna was a schoolteacher, her father Lewis a businessman.

At Swarthmore College Judy majored in Psychology and English, but she finally decided to follow her scientific and humanitarian interests by attending medical school at Harvard, from where she graduated in 1959 (1 of 5 women). After an internship at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, she started her psychiatric training in Boston. then, after marrying Stanley in 1961, at St.

Elizabeth's hospital in Washington. In 1962, Judy and Stanley took research fellowships in Sweden, where Judy studied at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Throughout her life, she maintained close personal relations with friends and colleagues from Sweden. Her son Erik was born in Uppsala on the coldest day of the year.

At the Karolinska, Judy was introduced to 'biological psychiatry,' the use of objective quantitative methods for psychiatric research, in contrast to the psychanalytical orientation of American psychiatry at the time.

After further training in psychiatry on returning to Washington, Judy was appointed to the faculty of Pediatrics at Georgetown University, then as Chief of the Child Psychiatry Branch at the Intramural Program of the National Institute of Mental Health, NIH. There, she established a world-class clinical research and training program on how genetic and environmental factors determine brain development during childhood and adolescence, with particular focus on hyperactive children, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and childhood onset schizophrenia.

Of her many publications, the one that she enjoyed most in writing was a popular New York Time's best seller, "The Boy who Couldn't Stop Washing." This book chronicles experiences of numerous sufferers of OCD, a condition that impels rational people to behave irrationally in some way, discussing the symptoms, effects, and new treatments for this debilitating disease.

Much of Judy's volunteer work was related to her clinical interests. In addition to maintaining a household and bringing up two children who attended Georgetown Day School, she helped to found the OCD Foundation. She was elected to the American College for Neuropsychopharmacology, National Alliance for Schizophrenia and Depression, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Judy was an avid reader and book club participant and maintained close relationships with former mentees and friends. She and Stanley were lifelong members of the Appalachian trail club and spent much time with their children when they were young in cabins and trails in the Shenandoah Mountains. She loved traveling with Stanley, with whom she shared many interests, both scientific and cultural. She particularly enjoyed in later life the time spent with their sons and their families (including grandchildren Ty, Lukas, Maxime and Adrien) in San Francisco or France.