Winfred Overholser

Who is Winfred Overholser?

Winfred Overholser was a U.S. psychiatrist, president of the American Psychiatric Association, and for 25 years the superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a federal institution for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1892, Winfred Overholser graduated from Harvard College in 1912 and received a medical degree from Boston University in 1916.

He was Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases and worked with the National Committee for Mental Hygiene in New York.

In 1940, he and his colleague Harry Stack Sullivan, as members of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Military Mobilization, formulated guidelines for the psychological screening of inductees to the United States military.

He campaigned for recognition of alcoholism as a mental disease, calling it in 1940 "the greatest public health problem which is not being scientifically attacked. As early as 1941 he warned of the need to consider the mental health of an aging population and said that old age pensions could prove to be "one of the most important developments in the prevention of mental breakdowns in later life."