Dr A Arthur Sugerman, a member of ACNP since 1967 and a scholarly and distinguished psychiatrist, died on 24 January 2007, a week before his seventy-eighth birthday. He published widely on the use of antipsychotic drugs in the treatment of schizophrenia as well as on EEG studies and addiction. He was born in Dublin and studied medicine at Trinity College and Dublin University. He began his psychiatric education in Newcastle with the late Sir Martin Roth, obtaining DPM degrees from both Newcastle and the Royal College.

Dr Sugerman moved to the United States soon after, and in the early 1960s, worked and published with Carl C Pfeiffer, Leonide Goldstein and Henry B Murphree at the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute, where they carried out many EEG studies on patients and subjects taking a range of psychotropic agents. After that, he was a research fellow at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, where he earned his Doctorate in Medical Science.

As a result of his interest in research and treatment, Dr Sugerman became part of the small group of psychiatrists who were members of the Early Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit funded by the NIMH. There was a high level of enthusiasm among these investigators when they met at their biannual get-together as well as at the ACNP. These units investigated most of the marketed typical antipsychotics. Several of these studies represented the first trial of these agents on inpatients suffering from schizophrenia, as was the case, for example, with mesoridazine and molindone in New Jersey. Dr Sugerman also had a growing interest in the problems of addiction, particularly alcoholism, and published many articles in this area.

In the mid-1970s, perhaps because of changes in the research climate, funding streams, or the need to provide his children with the best education, he left full-time research and became more involved in private practice. He became the Medical Director of the Carrier Clinic in addition to serving as Director of Research there. He was a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a Visiting Professor at both Hahnemann University in Philadelphia and at the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University. He published more than 170 scientific articles, in addition to such classics as ‘Remembrance of Drugs Past,’ in which he lamented the passing of ‘the good old days’ (his quotation marks) when, as he noted with characteristic irony, ‘rules for obtaining informed consent from patients were not very stringent’ (A Triumph of Psychopharmacology and the Story of the CINP, ANIMULA Publishing House, Budapest, 2000, p. 79).

He was proud of his background and family and devoted to genealogy. He had a delightful sense of humor, smiled more than laughed out loud, and could tell a joke in a range of accents or languages. Those of us who knew him were fond of saying he was unique among psychiatrists in having both the Hebrew and the Gaelic. A devoted family man, he leaves behind his wife of 46 years, Ruth, as well as three sons, a daughter and a grandson.