Mary Violette Seeman

Education and Career

Mary Seeman was educated in Montreal (BA, McGill) and did postgraduate training at the Sorbonne, receiving an MD and CM at McGill University (1960). She received psychiatric training at the Adolf Meyer Psychiatric Hospital (New York) and Columbia University and psychopharmacological research begun in 1965 in New York was expanded during periods as registrar and researcher at Fulbourn Hospital at Cambridge, as staff psychiatrist at Toronto Western Hospital (1968), and as associate and later professor (1980) of the department of psychiatry, University of Toronto.

Career Highlights

Mary Seeman became head of the Active Treatment Clinic of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto and co-ordinator of Studies in Schizophrenia for the Institute (1981). Her clinical research on schizophrenia has resulted in a clearer understanding of the physiological, biochemical, cellular and psychohormonal basis of schizophrenia. Her extensive knowledge of the molecular basis of, and experience in treatment of, schizophrenia is evident in an extensive record of publication in scholarly journals and books. She heads the ethics committee of the Clarke Institute and of the Ontario Psychiatric Association. In 1984 she was elected president of the Ontario branch of the American Psychiatric Association. Seeman and co-workers have rendered a seminal service by summarizing the current state of the scientific and clinical basis of schizophrenia and its management in a book for the layperson: Living and Working with Schizophrenia (1982).

Personal Life

In 1959, Mary Seeman married Philip Seeman.