Thomas Detre

Thomas P. Detre, M.D. (17 May 1924 – 9 October 2010) was a psychiatrist, academic, and senior administrator at the University of Pittsburgh, eulogized as the "visionary" leader most responsible for the transformation the university's teaching hospitals into the currently construed University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and elevating the stature of the university's six schools of health sciences through increased emphasis on research.

Early life Born "Tamás Feldmeier" to a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest, he decided at the age of 14 to become a psychiatrist, Detre himself never explained his name's origins.)

While completing his medical studies in Rome in the early 1950s, Detre counseled a small American expatriate clientele which included the writer Claude Fredericks and his 25-year-old friend, the poet James Merrill, who sought Detre's help for writer's block. In his 1993 memoir, A Different Person, Merrill wrote of the lifelong recurring dividend from his early, formal, and painstaking psychoanalysis in Rome with "Dr. Detre", with whom he kept daily appointments throughout 1951-1952 (with Detre saying little or nothing in most sessions).

After Detre obtained a U.S. visa in 1953, The couple moved to Connecticut in 1957 after Detre was hired by Yale University, and successfully transplanted their loyalties to Pittsburgh in 1973 (a city in which Merrill was hospitalized several times in 1993-1994 for AIDS complications, his spirits lifted by Detre's promise: "Katherine and I will see you through" ).

Career Between 1957 and 1973, Detre established at Yale School of Medicine a new model of psychiatric care which dramatically reduced hospitalization lengths, and which in its broadly integrative approach ultimately brought psychiatry much closer to other domains of medicine.

In 1973, Detre gave up tenure at Yale to lead the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and become Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. Clinical Psychiatry: Psychotherapy Topics Volume 2; Thomas P. Detre, Saeed Shamloo, Hamideh Jahangiri; ISBN 978-613-8-93041-9 (Scholars' Press)