Eli Robins

Eli Robins (1921 Texas - 1994 Washington) was an American psychiatrist who played a pivotal role in establishing the way mental disorders are researched and diagnosed today.

Robins finished his medical training and residencies at Harvard, where he worked under biologically-oriented psychiatrist Mandel E. Cohen who would greatly influence his career and with whom he first developed ideas about operational definitions for psychiatric conditions (the theory of operationalization having been recently advanced by Harvard physicist and philosopher of science Percy Williams Bridgman). Robins rejected the then dominant psychoanalysis, having personally undergone it for a year as was the norm in training, describing it as 'silly' (he also had a relative who committed suicide at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital while being treated with psychoanalytic methods).

Robins moved to the psychiatric department at Washington University in St. Louis in 1949, initially as a pharmacology fellow working in the lab of biochemist Oliver H. Lowry, author of the most cited scientific paper ever (on a method for measuring proteins).

Throughout his career he published on brain neurochemistry and histology. He would be author on more than 175 peer-reviewed articles, including on suicide, hysteria, homosexuality and depression.

In 1956/57 he conducted a large-scale community-based study of suicides in St Louis which involved detailed structured interviews with people who had been in regular contact with the person beforehand. This has been noted as the first completed example of a practice that was shortly thereafter termed psychological autopsy by researchers in Los Angeles (coiner Edwin S. Shneidman).

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