Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame
Inducted 2006| “David Hawkins was among the first psychiatrists to show that both schizophrenic and alcoholic patients could be treated successfully with vitamin B3“ |
| —Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D. |
David Ramon Hawkins grew up in rural Wisconsin and served aboard a US Navy minesweeper during the closing months of WW II. He earned his BA from Marquette University in 1950 and his MD from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1953. Hawkins interned at Columbia Hospital in 1954, was awarded a fellowship in psychiatry at Mt. Sinai Hospital in 1956, and then became Supervising Psychiatrist for the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene. From 1956-1980, he was medical director of North Nassau Mental Health Center in Manhasset, New York, one of the largest psychiatric practices in New York with 50 employees and 1,000 new patients each year. He was also director of research at Brunswick Hospital in Long Island from 1968-1979, and a guest on TV shows including McNeal-Lehrer and Today.
In 1973, along with Nobel-prizewinner Linus Pauling, Dr. Hawkins co-edited Orthomolecular Psychiatry: Treatment of Schizophrenia, the first psychiatric textbook of its kind. Among other honours, Hawkins received the Huxley Award in 1979 and, interestingly enough, a Physicians Recognition Award from the American Medical Association in 1992. He served on the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry editorial board and was founding president of the Academy of Orthomolecular Psychiatry. The Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry/Medicine has published book reviews and 7 papers by Dr. Hawkins. Two of these, on the prevention and nutritional treatment of tardive dyskinesia, are posted online at http://www.orthomed.org/jom/papers/html. During retirement, he developed an especially keen interest in spirituality and consciousness, resulting in his writing a best-selling trilogy, Power vs. Force, The Eye of the I and I: Reality and Subjectivity.
