LOIS TALBOT FLAHERTY Obituary
LOIS TALBOT FLAHERTY Obituary
We are very sad to anounce the loss of our former past president Lois Flaherty. Lois was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 28, 1942. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1963, received her M.D. from Duke University in 1968, completed her adult psychiatry residency at Georgetown University and child psychiatry residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She joined the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where she remained until 1993 and worked as Director of Training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Then she became faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard University. On the other hand, she directed the Child and Adolescent Services at the Walter P. Carter Community Mental Health Center from 1977 to 1992. Never fully retired, she volunteered as an instructor and research mentor for psychiatry fellows at the renowned Cambridge Hospital program until recently. Among her many contributions to the field in her country USA, the founding of the Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland in 1992 was exemplary of her legacy. This initiative led her to recieve the Sidney Berman Award for the School-Based Study and Treatment of Learning Disorders and Mental Illness by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2023, the same year in which she published her last scholarly work entitled: "The Kids are not OK: Challenges and Opportunities in School Mental Health". She bacame the president of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry (ASAP) in 1995 which also opened the way to become involved with ISAPP. She served as editor-in-chief of Adolescent Psychiatry, the official publication of the ASAP for a remarkable 22-year term (1999-2021). She was the president of ISAPP in 2015-2019 and thereafter continued on the ISAPP Executive Committee as the past president. Lois was a very compassionate, humble, reliable, and good friend as well as a hardworking and productive child and adolescent psychiatrist,. We will miss her very much.