Eisenbergs set to receive prestigious APA award

Lecturer on social medicine Carola Eisenberg, one of the five founding members of Physicians for Human Rights (an organization that shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution to the campaign for banning land mines), and her husband, Leon Eisenberg, the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine Emeritus in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, will receive the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) 2005 Human Rights Award at APA’s annual meeting in Atlanta on May 23.

Established in 1990, the award is given to individuals and organizations whose efforts “exemplify the capacity of human beings to act courageously and effectively to prevent human rights violations, to protect others from human rights violations and their psychiatric consequences, or to help victims recover from human rights abuses.”

Both of the Eisenbergs have participated in often risky human rights missions: Carola traveled to El Salvador during a guerrilla war against a right-wing government, to Chile during the Pinochet regime, and to Paraguay during the dictatorship of President Alfredo Stroessner; and Leon, who is also the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, went to Greece to serve as a witness for the defense during a sedition trial of an academic pediatrician when the military junta was in power.