Richard Sens

Richard Sens, a Bronx-born, Harvard-educated psychiatrist and a mainstay in the Boston mental health community whose 50 year-career was marked by a singular generosity, died on Nov. 20, 2015 at the age of 80. The cause of death was complications from kidney failure.
The son of an egg salesman, Dr. Sens was born and raised in the Bronx, New York where he attended the city's storied DeWitt Clinton High School. He graduated from Harvard University in 1956, and returned to New York to earn his medical degree at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine with a residency in child psychology at Beth Israel Hospital. After serving in the Navy during the Korean War, he returned to Boston in 1964 and began a career as a psychiatrist and teacher – first as a resident at Harvard's McLean Hospital and later on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. During the 1970s and '80s he maintained a private practice in Brookline and Cambridge, specializing in child psychiatry. Troubled by the changes within the health-care industry during the 1990s, he worked as a clinician in Fall River serving a community hard hit by poverty and drug addiction.
Dr. Sens's career was distinguished by compassion and magnanimity for those most in need. As a clinician, he often treated patients irrespective of their ability to pay. Even as his own health declined, he remained unwavering in his commitment to his patients, keenly aware that he was frequently their only source of support. Many credited him with saving their lives.
He was a great lover of books, jazz and baseball. Despite being born and raised in New York, Dr. Sens was a faithful Red Sox fan who called Harvard Square home for most of his adult life. His connection to the neighborhood reached back to the 1950s, when as an undergraduate at Harvard, he worked as an usher at the Brattle Theatre to help pay his tuition. A fan of Humphrey Bogart, he helped persuade the theater's operators to screen Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon during final exams. The screenings became a tradition that gave rise to a cult of Bogart that remains alive at the Brattle today.
Dr. Sens is survived by his wife, Linda; two children from a previous marriage, Joshua and Alexander; his sister, Brenda; and four grandchildren, Emilia, Jonah, Scarlett and Leo. He will be deeply missed by his family, his many friends and the patients whose lives he touched.