of New Jersey. Her father, an electrical engineer, supported her dream and encouraged her; he would be the last man to do that for a while. She first thought of studying the brain and its relationship with mental illness at the University of Wisconsin, reading whatever she could about the neurological effects of hallucinogenic drugs. But her timing was not ideal. She graduated in 1966, when the Vietnam War was motivating many of her male classmates to apply to medical school to get deferments. Women who applied alongside those men were going in with an automatic disadvantage: Why would a medical school give a slot to a woman, when every man they turned down might be sent off to war?
Lynn struggled to find a work-around. She took a year off after college and found full-time work as a research assistant at Columbia University, and took graduate classes in biology at night at New York University. In the science library, she met the man she would marry, a graduate student named Charles DeLisi. Before their wedding, she enrolled in medical school at the only place that would take her: the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After her first year, she applied to transfer to schools in New York, where Charles was still in graduate school. One interviewer asked if her family was more important to her than her career; another asked if she planned on using birth control. No one would take her.
Even her husband had expected her to quit medical school and switch over to a less demanding graduate program. But she stayed in the program with help from the dean—a woman who made a practice of championing young women in the profession—who arranged for DeLisi to take her second year of classes at NYU medical school. The next year, when DeLisi’s husband got a postdoc at Yale, they moved to New Haven; DeLisi commuted by train all the way back to classes at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. When she got pregnant with her first child, her dean stepped in to help her again, arranging for her to take classes at Yale for her entire final year.
DeLisi graduated medical school in 1972. Once again, they moved for her husband’s work, this time to New Mexico, where Lynn started a general practice, treating poor migrant workers. She gave birth to their second child there, and when her husband had a job offer in Washington, she applied for residencies there. “I was interested in schizophrenia because it was a real disease of the brain,” she remembered. “It wasn’t, you know, just everyday anxiety. It was a real neurological disease.” Being close to NIMH, DeLisi thought, would put her alongside people who felt the same way.
It took time for her to find those people. While St. Elizabeths had wards full of schizophrenia patients, the study of schizophrenia as a physical ailment was not in fashion, at least among the supervisors of her residency program. One problem was practical: The patients never seemed to get better. Better to spend your career working on depression or eating or anxiety disorders or bipolar illness—something with even a glimmer of hope, that sometimes responded to the traditional cure of talk therapy.
Then there was the deeper problem—the same nature-nurture argument that had divided the field for decades. DeLisi’s program was really run by psychoanalysts, not medical psychiatrists, as she had hoped. During her residency, people like her who were interested in schizophrenia were allowed to take their third year at Chestnut Lodge. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s old command post was still in business, a few miles down the road in suburban Maryland, and the therapists there still considered childhood trauma to be one of the main influences in the development of serious mental illness. So did many of DeLisi’s teachers at St. Elizabeths.
DeLisi kept reading what she could find about the biology of schizophrenia, and she kept seeing the same name affiliated with NIMH: Richard Wyatt, a neuropsychiatrist who explored not therapy but the effects of mental illness on the brain itself. Wyatt’s lab was across town from the rest of the NIMH psychiatry program in the William A. White Building, a century-old red-brick structure on the St. Elizabeths campus with enough room to house patients for long-term study. In 1977, toward the end of her residency at St. Elizabeths,
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