Marvin J. Schwarz, MD, JD, Has Spent Seven Decades Speaking Up for Patients the System Overlooks

SKOKIE, Ill. Most physicians spend a career learning one profession well. Marvin J. Schwarz learned two. A board certified psychiatrist who earned his medical degree in 1950, he went back to school decades later and finished a law degree in 1983, then put both to work for patients who often have the least say in how they are treated.

Dr. Schwarz is the president of Associates in Adolescent Psychiatry, the practice he started in 1961. His clinical focus has long been on children and teenagers, and his legal work has followed the same instinct. He advises government agencies and health care providers on how federal rules, state rules and day to day operations fit together when care is delivered and paid for.

One issue he returns to often is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In his view, the law has quietly turned local school districts into the largest source of mental health services for young people in the country, and it has handed them legal duties that most districts are not equipped to carry out. He works on how that law is read and applied.

His path to psychiatry ran through the hard sciences. After medical school at Wayne State University and training in internal medicine and psychiatry in Detroit, he studied molecular biology and physical chemistry as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had earlier done graduate work in mathematics and chemistry at Ohio State University and studied technology at the Oak Ridge Institute.

For a time his work took him into aviation medicine. At the Air Force Air Research and Development Command Aero Medical Laboratory he ran a pulmonary physiology laboratory that studied how to protect people flying at altitudes close to a vacuum, and he served as the medical liaison to the Air Force program that explored nuclear powered aircraft.

Back in Chicago he built a long record in academic medicine. He directed child psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center and led the biological laboratories at the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training at Michael Reese Hospital Medical Center. He was clinical director of adolescent services at Riveredge Hospital and chief of child psychiatry liaison services at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and the Institute for Juvenile Research.

He taught on the faculties of the University of Illinois, Indiana University and the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University, and he was a visiting professor in the department of ministry at Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary. While at the University of Illinois he helped rework how the inpatient system of the Illinois Department of Mental Health was run.

His law degree, earned at Loyola University School of Law, opened a second front. Drawing on both medicine and law, he has taken part in civil rights cases and class actions on behalf of people with mental illness in several states, including work that enforced their liberty rights under the 14th Amendment. He has also given his time to drafting state mental health statutes.

Dr. Schwarz has written articles for professional journals and helped write textbooks in his field. He holds a medical license in Illinois and is certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

Dynamo Times recognizes Marvin J. Schwarz, MD, JD, for a career that joined medicine and law in defense of young people and of patients whose rights are too easily set aside.