In Memoriam: Warren Brodey, MD, and Psychiatry as a Many-Splendored Thing

This may be the most unusual eulogy of psychiatrists that I have done.

The New York Times article on August 20, 2025, titled “Warren Brodey, 101, Dies a Visionary of the Dawn of the Information Age” got the attention of my son, who asked if I knew him.¹ I did not but came to wish I had. Just consider his life and career:

• Born in Toronto, he lived to 101, the oldest psychiatrist about whom I have done a eulogy.
• He lived for a time in a New England nudist colony.
• He embraced Maoism in a Scandinavian ironworks.
• He worked on CIA-funded extrasensory perception.
• He studied and explored “soft architecture” that could change shapes for some degree.

Early in his career as a psychiatrist, he did study psychoanalysis. His clinical work focused some on cybernetics, a circular feedback version of general systems theory, as applied to the family. That gave focus to external influences on the family, like work problems. To continue to explore cybernetics, in 1965 he took an unpaid job at MIT, later getting a grant from NASA.

Disillusioned by the end of the Hippie movement, he renounced his citizenship and moved to Norway. There, he became interested in Chinese Communism for a while, but then also became disillusioned in that.

He anticipated artificial intelligence early on and was concerned with whether technology would enhance society as it was or, preferably, be used for revolutionary change. He died still cautiously optimistic about creative-enhancing technology that could help overcome the weakness and vulnerabilities of human nature, what might be called a technology psychotherapy.

Probably one simple way to describe him was as a “creative psychiatrist.” I would not be surprised if we eventually see some of his ideas were ahead of his time, but will become more practical.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

Reference

1. Risen C. Warren Brodey, 101, dies a visionary of the dawn of the information age. August 20, 2025. Accessed August 26, 2025. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/technology/warren-brodey-dead.html