Dr. Mary Seeman was best known for her work related to women and schizophrenia, and she established the first outpatient clinic for women with psychosis at CAMH.Courtesy of Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto
In the 1960s, when Mary Seeman completed medical school and trained in psychiatry, people who had mental illness were blamed for their condition, or it was attributed to bad parenting, specifically poor mothering. Patients with schizophrenia garnered the least respect, care and research.
Dr. Seeman felt compassion for these patients, and that informed her approach as both a clinician and researcher while she worked as a psychiatrist in Toronto at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and Mount Sinai Hospital, and as a professor at the University of Toronto.
“Her mantra was to listen to the patients first,” her son, Neil Seeman, says.
Dr. Seeman died on April 23 at the age of 89. She was best known for her work related to women and schizophrenia; she established the first outpatient clinic for women with psychosis at CAMH. She also enriched and influenced the groundbreaking neuropharmacological research of her husband, Philip Seeman.
Longtime colleague David Goldbloom, a psychiatrist, believed that her experience of escaping Nazi-occupied Poland led her to feel an affinity for people with intractable mental illness. “She understood the experience of adversity from an early age,” he says. “She really came at her work from from a broad perspective, both scientific and humanistic.”
Her research – and that of her husband – helped chart some of the physiological underpinnings of mental illness, which has led to new treatments and better use of existing drugs.
The way she spoke publicly about her patients helped the medical community and the public learn more about mental illness, and contributed to the slow process of destigmatizing it. She did advocacy work with organizations such as the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, Doctors Against Racism and Anti-Semitism and the Texas-based Center for Medicine After the Holocaust.
“Mary was at the centre, from a researcher [side] but also the patient and education side, of that sea change that’s taken place over the past few decades on this topic,” Don Tapscott says. He and his wife, Ana Lopes, created the Tapscott Chair in Schizophrenia Studies in 1997, the first research chair to focus on schizophrenia in Canada; Dr. Seeman was the first person to hold this position.
“It was her status as a great researcher but also a respected leader. They wanted the first chair to be taken by someone who was respected on a national and international level,” Mr. Tapscott says.
Early on, Dr. Seeman noted gender differences in schizophrenia – women got it later in life, it manifested differently, and it had a different impact on their lives – and explored this in her research. She published numerous studies related to estrogen and the effectiveness of different treatment approaches for female patients.
“Mary was a pioneer in thinking about women and schizophrenia. She was ahead of her time in thinking about everything from biology to treatment to adaptation and to things like maternal roles and parenting,” Dr. Goldbloom says.
She co-authored books that proved indispensable for the psychiatric community, including 1990′s Living and Working with Schizophrenia. She also co-wrote the 2016 book Women and Psychosis: An Information Guide, for patients and their families.
“She was not an academic removed from the coalface of clinical care,” Dr. Goldbloom says. “She was as committed to her patients as she was to advancing knowledge.”
Philip Seeman, on her urging, did important research on the genetics of schizophrenia. She leveraged his findings in her clinical work and her own research. “It was a very complementary relationship both romantically and scientifically,” their son Neil says.
He isolated the dopamine D2 receptor and showed how it related to schizophrenia and how antipsychotic drugs worked on a neurological level. She, in turn, did research on how the second generation of antipsychotic drugs acted upon dopamine receptors.
For her contributions, she was named an officer of the Order of Canada, served in numerous high-profile positions and had a number of awards named for her at U of T, as well as a lecture.
She was born Mary Violette Szwarc on March 24, 1935, in Lódz, Poland, to chemist and inventor Aleksander and her mother, Sonja; she had an older brother, George. After the invasion of Poland, a Nazi official actually billeted in the home of the Jewish family. They managed to escape, travelling through Europe and living for eight months in Portugal.
Neil says his mother learned Portuguese during that time. As well, Mary told her friend Judy Leznoff that she and her brother used to scrounge for cigarette butts on the street in Portugal, and he would sell them to make money.
In 1941, the family travelled by boat to Ellis Island and then proceeded to Montreal. Dr. Seeman also told her friend that her passport indicated she was Christian – someone had lied to help her family.
Mary loved languages and studied them as an undergraduate at McGill University. She went on to receive a diploma in literature from the Sorbonne before returning to McGill to study medicine. Neil says his mother studied diligently and was one of about eight women in her class at medical school. (In 2021, she wrote that when she was a medical student she once called a doctor late at night to ask him to treat her mother, but he refused because the family was Jewish. That doctor was one of her professors.)
Philip Seeman was one of her classmates. “He was smitten with her right away,” says Neil, who noted that his father worked his way into his mother’s cadaver group to get close to her.
They married in 1959 and a year later they graduated then went together to Harper Hospital in Detroit for an internship, where she cemented her commitment to psychiatry, while he realized he was better suited to research. Then they went to Columbia University, where she did a psychiatry residency, and then further training at various New York hospitals, then Cambridge. By 1967, the family returned to Toronto, where Mary did an Ontario Mental Health Foundation Fellowship, soon followed by longer-term positions at the university and local hospitals.
By 1970, the Seemans were a family of five, with sons Marc, Bob and Neil.
Along with devoting more than 50 years to clinical care and research – she was publishing articles up until recently – Dr. Seeman made an impact on students at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Medical Science. Here, as a graduate co-ordinator starting in 2002, in a job she took after her official retirement from many of her academic and clinical roles, she helped develop a graduate oath in which students pledge to take an ethical approach to their studies.
In this role, Dr. Seeman spent considerable time with students who needed extra support. “That became a tradition,” says Mingyao Liu, director of the Institute of Medical Sciences. “She saw the university as a place not just to train someone to do research, but we have social accountability, and we are here to help people.”
Dr. Liu has stories of graduate students who never would have completed their programs without Dr. Seeman.
In her personal life, Dr. Seeman also made time for others. Once, when Ms. Leznoff was concerned about one of her kids, Dr. Seeman took a taxi – she did not drive – to the Leznoff home, spent time with the child and reassured the family that they had nothing to worry about.
Another time, when a friend’s husband left suddenly late one night, Dr. Seeman rushed over. “She was such a supportive friend.”
Dr. Seeman had wide-ranging interests, being fascinated by names (she even wrote a research paper about baby names).
She decorated her home with paintings created by her patients. “She explained them to me and how this was their way of dealing with life,” Ms. Leznoff says. “She cherished those paintings.”
Dr. Seeman leaves her three sons, their spouses and six grandchildren.
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