Yale Expert on Mental Health Services Receives Carl A. Taube Distinguished Career Award

Robert Rosenheck, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Yale and one of the world’s leading authorities on homelessness and post-traumatic stress disorder among military veterans, has received the Carl A. Taube Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Mental Health Services Research.

Given by the Mental Health Section of the American Public Health Association in memory of National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) staffer Carl A. Taube, the award recognizes researchers who have distinguished themselves in the field of mental health policy.

Rosenheck, also a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale and a psychiatrist at the VA in Connecticut, has published multiple journal articles on a broad range of mental health topics, including gender and race differences in mental health services; psychiatric disability and quality of life; mental illness and substance abuse; mentally ill homeless veterans and pharmacotherapy for schizophrenia.

According to Joseph Morrissey, professor of social medicine and psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rosenheck often uses his research to advocate for mentally ill veterans.

“We all spend a lot of time talking about how to make our research useful in the real world,” said Morrissey, who presented Resenheck with the award. “Bob has been doing this for the past decade within the VA, before the Veterans Committee on Capitol Hill, at various planning and policy forums, and in the leading professional journals.”

Rosenheck completed his undergraduate work at Harvard and received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He trained in the residency program at Yale and received training in analytic psychiatry at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. He began working at Yale and the VA hospital in 1977 and launched a successful career in clinical psychiatry.

Over the years, Rosenheck began to focus more on studying service delivery rather than just delivering services. He became chair of the Northeast Regional Mental Health Task Force, which was responsible for planning and implementing community care initiatives and cost efficiency assessments for the 24 VA hospitals in New York and New England. This led to the creation of the Northeast Program Evaluation Center, which he has operated for 15 years, and to a number of multi-hospital trials that he either directed or participated in. Rosenheck has played a central role in a series of overlapping research networks that began to develop an evidence base for VA psychiatric practices and service delivery.

Charles A. Taube, a long-time staff member of the NIMH, played a major role in creating the field of mental health services and policy research. In the early 1970s, Taube redesigned and reinvigorated the national reporting program at NIMH. He used these data over the next decade to analyze state mental hospital deinstitutionalization trends-the shift from inpatient to outpatient services utilization-as well as the changing financing patterns.