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Paul R. McHugh received his medical education at Harvard Medical School and did an internship at the
Peter Bent Brigham (now Brigham and Women's Hospital) and a neurology and neuropathology
residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He continued his education in Psychiatry at the Institute
of Psychiatry, University of London, and in the Division of Neuropsychiatry at Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research. After his training, he was eventually and successively Professor of Psychiatry at
Cornell University School of Medicine, Clinical Director and Director of Residency Education at the
New York Hospital Westchester Division; Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at
the Oregon Health Sciences Center. He was Henry Phipps Professor and Director of the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Psychiatrist-
in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975-2001. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
named him Distinguished Service Professor in 1998.
Dr. McHugh was Founder and First Director, Bourne Behavioral Research Laboratory of New York
Hospital, Westchester Division at Cornell. He was Chairman of the Medical Board, Johns Hopkins
Hospital, 1984-89. From 1985-1991, he was Chairman of the Professorial Promotions Committee at
Hopkins School of Medicine. From 1992-2001, he directed the Blades Center for Clinical Practice and
Research in Alcohol/Drug Dependence at Hopkins.
In 1986-89, Dr. McHugh was Chairman of the NIH BioPsychology Study Section. From 19821992, he
was Associate Editor, Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology for the American Journal of Physiology. He is also on the editorial boards of several psychiatry journals and book series. From 1993-
1998, he was on the Editorial Board of The American Scholar. Since 1987, he has been a member of the
Board of Trustees of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease. He received the
William C. Menninger Award, American College of Physicians, 1987, and the Joseph Zubin Award from
the American Psychopathological Association, 1995. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine, National
Academy of Sciences in 1992. In 2001, he was appointed by President Bush to the Presidential Council on
Bioethics.
His career has three interrelated themes. The first is to create a model department of academic psychiatry
by rendering explicit the conceptual structure of psychiatry and by demonstrating what this structure
implies for patient care, education and research. The second is to teach how the brain-mind problem is
embedded in these concepts and how it affects the thought and actions of psychiatrists. The third is to
investigate the "motivated" or "driven" behaviors, including the addictions that are open in this era to
multiple levels of analysis from molecular biology to social science. These ideas should be clear from the
directions he has given his Department, the careers he has fostered, and the books and papers he has
written.
Selections from among his publications:
- The Perspectives of Psychiatry, 1983 (book with P. R. Slavney). 2nd Edition in 1998
- William Osler and the New Psychiatry, 1985 (Award address)
- Mini-Mental State: A Practical Method for Grading the Cognitive State of Patients for the Clinician, 1975 (journal article with M. F. Folstein and S. E. Folstein), [Citation Classic, 1989]
- Genes, Brain, and Behavior, 1990 (book edited with V. A McKusick)
- A Structure for Psychiatry at the Century's Turn-The View from Johns Hopkins, (article in Jourrnal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 85: 483-487, 1992)
- Psychiatric Misadventures (essay in The American Scholar, selected and reprinted in The Best American Essays - 1993)