Bruce Dohrenwend

Bruce Philip Dohrenwend (born July 26, 1927) is an American psychiatric epidemiologist who studies the effects of social adversity on mental health. He is Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry and Professor of Epidemiology in the university's Mailman School of Public Health.

Education
Dohrenwend graduated from Columbia College (New York) in 1950, and the next year earned an M.A. in social psychology at Columbia University. In 1955 he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in social psychology. Before starting college he served in the United States Navy (1945-1946).

Career
In 1955 Dohrenwend worked under Alexander H. Leighton on the Stirling County Study, which was a community-based study of mental health in a Canadian community. In 1958 he joined the Columbia University faculty and began his research on the Washington Heights Community Health Project. He remained on the active faculty until 2020, when he retired. Before retiring he was the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry Professor, an endowed chair. Dohrenwend also had an appointment as Research Scientist, and later Chief of the Division of Social Psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, which is located at the Columbia Medical School campus.

In the early 1960s he and Barbara Snell Dohrenwend, a social and community psychologist who was also his wife, collaborated on a research program that focused on measuring psychopathology and stressful life events in community settings. Their collaboration led to the publication of dozens of articles, two coauthored monographs and two edited books. For their work they were jointly awarded the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Community Psychology and Community Mental Health from division 27 of the American Psychological Association (1980), and the Rema Lapouse Mental Health Epidemiology Award from the American Public Health Association (1981). Dr. Barbara Dohrenwend died in 1982.

Following the Three-Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown in March 1979, Bruce Dohrenwend was asked to chair a federal task force focused on the effects of stress experienced by workers and residents in the vicinity of the reactor. The group documented that mental stress caused by miscommunication of government and regulatory agencies was a serious consequence of the accident, despite the actual containment of radiation

Dohrenwend continued in the 1980s to advance his program of research that focused on causal mechanisms that explained the onset of psychopathology. He used a quasi-experimental design to show in 1991 that some disorders were more likely to be caused by stress processes, whereas other disorders were more likely to be caused by selection processes consistent with genetic factors. His report of this finding, published in Science, received the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) 1990 Prize for Behavioral Science Research.

Dohrenwend also developed a model of the genesis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among persons engaged in combat or who were in the vicinity of combat. Dohrenwend was specifically concerned with persons who had no predisposition for psychopathology but who were exposed to combat-related events that were markedly different from usual human experience.

Recognition and awards
In addition to the joint awards with Barbara Snell Dohrenwend, Bruce Dohrenwend was asked to serve as president of the American Psychopathological Association in 1994, and he received the following awards from professional organizations: Hamilton Award (1994) and Zubin Award (2008) from the American Psychopathological Association; Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychiatric Sociology, Society for the Study of Social Problems (1994); Leo G. Reeder Award for a Distinguished Career from the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (1999); Harvard Award for Outstanding Contributions and Lifetime Commitment to Psychiatric Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health (2004); In 2007 the Mental Health Section of the American Sociological Association gave Dohrenwend and his coauthors the  award for best 2006 publication for the article titled “The Psychological Risks of Vietnam for U.S. Veterans: A Revisit with New Data and Methods,” Science, 2006, 313, 979-982.

Notable Publications