Alfred Mordecai Freedman (1917 –2011) was born in Albany, New York and received his BA from Cornell University in 1937 and MD from the University of Minnesota in 1941. In 1943, he married Marcia Kohl, who was a labor economist at Columbia University. After his service as a medical officer in the US Army Corps during World War II, he worked with Dr. Harold Himwich on anti-cholinesterase agents. He received training as a resident in general and child psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in 1948 and became the senior psychiatrist under Dr. Lauretta Bender of the children’s service. He served on the faculty of New York University from 1950 to 1955 and subsequently became the psychiatrist to the Department of Pediatrics of SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn from 1955 to 1960, where he served on the Children’s Service at Kings County Hospital. At this time, he was the principal investigator on an NIH-supported project on the development of premature infants in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, which demonstrated the impact of poverty and deprivation and led to a program for stimulation and enrichment that was a precursor to Head Start.

In 1960, he became the first full-time Chairman and Professor of Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the New York Medical College (NYMC). The clinical base for the NYMC department was at the municipal Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem, where a social and community psychiatry division was set up to work with community groups and agencies on maternal and child mental health, outreach programs in neighborhoods, community oriented programs for substance abuse, detoxification, cognitive rehabilitation of deprived children, and services directed to aiding the development of new housing for people with mental illness and residents of public housing, including the remodeling of buildings by the Upper Park Avenue Community Association (UPACA). This division at the Metropolitan Hospital received the first construction and staffing grant in New York State under the 1963 Comprehensive Community Mental Health Center Act.

After expanding the activities of the NYMC psychiatry program, Dr. Freedman realized the need for a comprehensive psychiatry textbook and became the Founding and Senior Editor of The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, first published by Williams and Wilkins in 1967. When the medical school moved to Valhalla in Westchester County in 1980, Dr. Freedman continued to set up programs, including the Emergency Psychiatric Service for the county.

Dr. Freedman was President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1972-1973), the American Psychopathological Association (1971-1972), and Academia Medicinae and Psychiatriae (1990-1997). He also became the president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) from 1973 to 1974 after being approached by the Committee of Concerned Psychiatrists to be the petition candidate in the 1972 election, which he won by a margin of three votes. During his presidency of the APA, the board of trustees changed the listing of “homosexuality” to “sexual orientation disturbance” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders II (DSM-II). In addition, he led a group to the Soviet Union for the regional meeting of the World Psychiatric Association to discuss the question of psychiatric abuse and interview political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals while he was president of the APA. Although the interviews did not occur, the APA continued to focus on the misuse of psychiatry and psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. In addition, during Watergate, Nixon’s “Plumbers” broke into the office of Dr. Fielding, who was the psychoanalyst for Daniel Ellsberg, who had given the Pentagon Papers to the newspapers. Because of this breach of confidentiality, the APA with leading medical organizations organized a National Council on the Confidentiality of Medical Records, which Dr. Freedman was the first and only president of from 1973 to 1994.

Throughout his life, Dr. Freedman spoke out against the interrogation of people who are imprisoned or detained and the role of psychiatrists in executions. In addition, Dr. Freedman was the editor of the Political Psychology and Integrative Psychiatry journals and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Medical School. (1988-1993), the S.Y. Mak Visiting Professor at University of Hong Kong Medical School, and the Roche Visiting Professor in Australia and New Zealand through election by the Royal College. He received the first Wyeth-Ayerst Award for Distinction in Psychiatry for his contributions to the World Psychiatric Association’s objective to advance international cooperation in psychiatry in 1989. His other awards included the Samuel W. Hamilton Award of the American Psychopathological Association, the Jenne N. Knudson Award for Distinguished Service to the International Society of Political Psychology, the 2008 American Psychiatric Association Human Rights Award, and the Lapinlahti Medal and Lectureship, University of Helsinki. His research interests covered a range of topics, such as anti-cholinesterases, schizophrenia, biochemical basis of epilepsy, development of premature infants, drug addiction, opiate antagonists, and psychopharmacology in children and adults. He retired from the NYMC in 1989, but continued to be involved in professional organizations and activism related to psychiatry until his death in 2011.