Mary Violette Seeman

Mary Violette Seeman (née Szwarc) was never supposed to survive the Nazis who stormed her home in Lodz, Poland, maneuver herself to Montreal, secure a spot as a medical student at McGill in 1956, win acclaim in academia, and ultimately rise to renown in psychiatry for scrutinizing how women's mental health anguish differed from that of men, and why all of this mattered to everyone.

Her childhood didn't scar her with lifelong trauma, but rather inspired her to make sense of the mind and its frailties. In Poland, she lived with her mother, brother and a Nazi official billeted in their home - while her chemist and inventor father, Aleksander Szwarc, arranged from afar the needed visas to flee Nazi-occupied Europe, escaping captivity from a train destined for death, then securing the family's safety in Portugal. They had earlier coursed through Italy and France. In April 1941, Aleksander, Mary and her mother, Sonja and brother George sailed on the vessel Guiné to New York. From Ellis Island they considered California, but instead traveled to Montreal, where they settled.

Pursuing psychiatry and psychopharmacology, she recalled her dream to be a novelist when she learned that her psychiatrist colleagues told the greatest stories, and the arc of any patient and family's life is a beautiful story, each story being connected to all other stories in this universe.

For we are all connected. While working as a researcher and psychiatrist at Manhattan State Hospital in the 1960s, having inherited the patients of psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, she wrote, in a letter to her mother in Montreal: "I feel guilty for getting paid for the job I do, I enjoy it so much!" And these were the most unwell among the mentally ill, "schizophrenics" - she would later work tirelessly to ensure they be called "people with schizophrenia" - people with "broken brains," who, at the time, were considered ill on account of neglectful parenting as opposed to any neurological condition.

She battled to destigmatize mental illness, and to humanize her patients and their families.

Mary, among the early cohort of women entering McGill medical school in 1956, was also, with her young husband, dopamine scientist Philip Seeman, among the few women to intern at Harper Hospital in Detroit in 1961. Harper offered the best pay of any of the internships on offer and they needed the money to get by. Her lab scientist husband was her life-long soulmate and research partner (married in 1959) yet he was "all thumbs" when it came to medicine, she said, and she was the one who could connect with patients. So she said she was a Jungian, devoted to always expressing empathy to a patient. She was also an investigator, first, of women's mental health.

Why were estrogens significant, but deemed unimportant, in the mental health of women, she wondered? Why did the onset and the pathogenesis of mental illness affect women differently than men? What alleviation could we give to the mothers of children suffering from schizophrenia and other major mental health maladies? So curious, all the time. And so said the late scientist, Ursula Franklin, who advocated on behalf of Mary when kvetching burst out at the university appointments committee over her tenure prospects. Hadn't Mary, some on the appointments committee asked, just "followed her husband" dutifully from Rockefeller University to the University of Toronto?

And so Ursula advocated for Mary, and Mary, in turn, advocated for thousands of women doctors and scientists who followed her. When being interviewed in 1985 for the position she once held, chief of psychiatry at Mt. Sinai hospital in Toronto, the selection committee asked her what management experience she'd had. She paused, then replied: "I raised three boys, four, including my husband." And so she did. She never took out a driver's license, and so she slung her boys to school on bus routes in Toronto whilst never abandoning patients. She worked seven days a week, enjoying each day. And yet she'd always find time to console anyone in grief or ill health. She made her scarce minutes of consolation to those in need feel like an hour or more. She was a remarkable listener.

She was Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and served as the Tapscott Chair in Schizophrenia from 1997 to 2000.

Patients would call her in the evenings at home. She always wanted to be there for them. In the final weeks of her life, some of those same patients called to wish her well and sent flowers. She felt treatments couldn't do enough for her patients. However, she knew she made them feel ennobled, "schizophrenics" no longer but rather people living under the spell of psychosis and its associated delusions and hallucinations. Philip dedicated himself to the dopamine neurochemistry that was askew in their brains while Mary tended to patients' everyday needs: managing their medication, their search for love, a paying job, or how to keep safe from their own worries engulfing them.

We are all connected. These patients were no lesser than anyone, she contended. She taught this to her children, students, and contemporaries in different countries. She believed in the science of baby steps when facing down any challenge, personal or professional. All adored her. Beloved by colleagues across the world, she was predeceased by her brother, George, and her husband Philip, and she leaves behind three devoted sons, Marc (Ellen), Bob (Nicola), and Neil (Sarit), and six wonderful grandchildren - her love for them uncapped - Ahron and Geoffrey, Ciara and Ronan, and Davey and Dori. Plus many adoring cousins and friends, and their families, across the world: Martin and Carolyn in Israel; John and Theresa in Kingston, Ontario; Glenn and Michele in Calgary; and Cooper in Vancouver. She was, and is, a family matriarch who bonded her family, and bonded her myriad colleagues and dear friends across all the world. She was sui generis, brimming with laughter though serious, too.

She'd likely think this too long a tribute to write about her, embarrassed as she was by her many deserving accolades and attention, but she'd smile twinkly-eyed and always say - "it's perfect dear" - and she'd make others laugh, too. Hers was a life marked by survival, and by laughter, each day, at the wonder of life.

In later years she devoted time to investigating family genealogy and commemorating relatives and millions of European Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. Attaching names and dignity to all peoples of all backgrounds, for posterity, is what mattered to her.

In memory of Dr. Mary V. Seeman, OC, MD, DSc, of her commitment to mental health, and in lieu of flowers, the family kindly asks that donations be made to the CAMH Foundation in her memory: www.camh.ca/maryseeman.