Dr. Frank J. Ayd Jr., a psychiatrist who pioneered the field of psychopharmacology when he began treating schizophrenics with Thorazine in the early 1950s, died in his sleep March 17 at Lorien Mays Chapel Health Care Center in Baltimore. He was 87.
At a time when the psychiatric establishment rejected the notion that mental illness was rooted in biology, Ayd championed the use of medications to adjust brain chemistry and relieve a patient's suffering.
"He was a biological psychiatrist, one of the important kinds of people who in spite of -- and against -- the establishment had the guts to stand up and really do things," said Dr. Thomas Ban, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "Many people claim pioneering, but he really was. He entered the field when the whole thing started."
Dr. Philip G. Janicak, a Chicago psychiatrist and editor of International Drug Therapy Newsletter, said, "Dr. Ayd was one of the founding fathers of modern psychiatry. He changed the direction of psychiatry."
Born in Baltimore and raised near Johns Hopkins Hospital, Ayd was the son of a pediatrician and grandson of a pharmacist.
He earned his bachelor's degree from Loyola College in 1942, then entered the University of Maryland Medical School, where he was halfway through a residency in pediatrics when the Navy called him to active duty in 1943. While in the Navy, he attended medical school and graduated in 1945.
One of his early assignments was to the U.S. Veterans Hospital in Perry Point, Md., where he served a two-year residency in psychiatry from 1946 to 1948.
"Perry Point predominantly had people who had been sick for years and years. I had patients from the Spanish American War through World War II," Ayd told Psychiatric Times in 2005.
"Some had been at the hospital 20, 40, 60 years. Many [clinicians] used to say, 'All ye who enter here should abandon hope,' because we didn't have effective treatments for them [the mentally ill] in those days," he said.
His patients included those who were unable to experience pain or distinguish hot from cold, those who heard voices and those who were engulfed by hallucinations or were violent.
In an era that favored psychoanalysis and electroconvulsive therapy, Ayd began experimenting with drugs to treat patients.
In 1950, Ayd went into private practice and three years later Smith Kline & French asked if he would be interested in evaluating Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication, for patients who suffered from delusions.
