Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
Board of Governors Professor, Department of Sociology
avhorw@rci.rutgers.edu, (848) 932-8378
Dr. Allan Horwitz was trained in psychiatric epidemiology at Yale and is the author of over one hundred books, articles, and chapters in the mental health area. Since 1980, he has served as co-director of the Institute’s NIMH-funded postdoctoral program in mental health services. During 2013-16 he is serving as the Interim Director of the Health Institute. Professor Horwitz has studied a variety of aspects of mental health and illness, including the social response to mental illness, family caretaking for dependent populations, the impact of social roles and statuses on mental health, and the social construction of mental disorders. His current work integrates biological and sociological perspectives in distinguishing between normal and dysfunctional types of depression and anxiety. He has been principal investigator in projects on the role of family members in the care of the seriously mentally ill funded by the Milbank Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He has also served as chair of the Psychiatric Sociology Division of the Society for the Study of Social Programs and chair of the Mental Health and Medical Sociology Sections of the American Sociological Association. In 2006 he received the Pearlin Award from the Mental Health Section of the American Sociological Association for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to the sociology of mental health. Dr. Horwitz was chair of the sociology department at Rutgers between 1984-1990 and between 1997-2000 and served as Dean for the Social and Behavioral Sciences at Rutgers between 2006 and 2011. He is the author of seven books, The Social Control of Mental Illness, The Logic of Social Control, Creating Mental Illness, and The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (with Jerome Wakefield), Diagnosis, Evidence, and Therapy: Conundrums of American Medicine (with Gerald Grob), All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders (with Jerome Wakefield, and Anxiety: A Short History) and co-edited A Handbook for the Study of Mental Health: Social Contexts, Theories, and Systems. During the 2007-08 academic year he was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. In the 2012-13 year he was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Study in Palo Alto, CA.
