Former APA President Pedro Ruiz, M.D., Dies

Former APA President Pedro Ruiz, M.D., died on March 14 in League City, Texas, at the age of 86. Ruiz was a renowned psychiatrist, educator, and researcher who made significant contributions to psychiatry throughout his distinguished career.

Ruiz was also president of a number of other major psychiatric associations, including the World Psychiatric Association (2011-2014), the American College of Psychiatrists (2000-2001), the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (2002-2003), and the American Association of Social Psychiatry (2000-2002), to name a few. He was APA president for the 2006-2007 term.

Ruiz was born in Cuba, where events relating to the Cuban revolution interrupted his education and forced him to leave. He completed his medical school education at the University of Paris in France and trained in general psychiatry at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

In 1968 Ruiz joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where he rose from instructor to professor and held a number of administrative and academic positions. From 1979 to 1981, he was director of the Bronx State Psychiatric Center. He moved to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston as a professor of psychiatry in 1981 and then the University of Texas at Houston in 1993, where he also was interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He went on to be a professor, executive vice chair, and director of clinical programs in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Over the span of his career, Ruiz served on more than 40 editorial boards, wrote over 1,000 publications, and won numerous prestigious awards. Among the APA awards he received were the Simon Bolivar Award, APA Administrative Psychiatry Award, and George Tarjan Award.

His dedication to advocating for patients never wavered. In his last president’s column for Psychiatric News in 2007, Ruiz wrote, “We, as physicians and psychiatrists, must rise to the occasion and help our mentally ill patients be given the human dignity and quality of psychiatric care that they fully deserve. In this respect, we must go beyond the boundaries of our offices: We must join organized medicine, we must publicly advocate on behalf of our patients, we must join forces with patient advocacy organizations, and we must ensure that our patients get the medical care they need. To avoid our professional responsibilities will result in letting our country return to the dark ages of psychiatry’s history—a time when people with mental illness were locked up, warehoused in asylums, or left to wander in cities or the countryside.” ■