Gene D. Cohen, Geriatric Psychiatrist, Dies at 65
Gene D. Cohen, a pioneer in the field of geriatric psychiatry who helped shift the emphasis in gerontological research from the problems of people as they age to their potential, died Saturday at his home in Kensington, Md. He was 65.
The cause was metastatic prostate cancer, his wife, Wendy Miller, said. At his death, Dr. Cohen was the founding director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University and had held leadership positions at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Dr. Cohen was an expert on what happens in the brain as it ages and on Alzheimer’s disease. Both as a researcher and as a spokesman for research in gerontology — he was often a guest on television news programs and made a series of public service messages with the comedian George Burns — he was instrumental in bringing information about aging to the public.
His outlook was optimistic, which he conveyed in books for general audiences. As research in the 1990s began to show that the brain was less susceptible to being ravaged by age than had previously been thought, he spoke to news organizations, television audiences, legislators and potential research patrons, emphasizing that aging is not in itself a cause of debilitation of the brain; more often, he said, disease is the cause.
“He was one of the founders of geriatric psychiatry,” said Gay Hanna, executive director of the Center for Creative Aging, an organization that studies the relationship between creativity and healthy aging and that Dr. Cohen brought to George Washington. No one, she added, had more understanding of “phenomena happening in the brain as we age, and their effect on psychosocial and cognitive development.”
Dr. Cohen devoted much of the last decade and a half of his life to exploring the relationship between aging and creativity. He was the project director for a study, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, that assessed the impact on older people of cultural programs provided by professional artists. He invented and copyrighted a number of games — a combination of chess and Scrabble, for example — to stimulate and exercise the brains of elderly people.
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The cause was metastatic prostate cancer, his wife, Wendy Miller, said. At his death, Dr. Cohen was the founding director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University and had held leadership positions at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Dr. Cohen was an expert on what happens in the brain as it ages and on Alzheimer’s disease. Both as a researcher and as a spokesman for research in gerontology — he was often a guest on television news programs and made a series of public service messages with the comedian George Burns — he was instrumental in bringing information about aging to the public.
His outlook was optimistic, which he conveyed in books for general audiences. As research in the 1990s began to show that the brain was less susceptible to being ravaged by age than had previously been thought, he spoke to news organizations, television audiences, legislators and potential research patrons, emphasizing that aging is not in itself a cause of debilitation of the brain; more often, he said, disease is the cause.
“He was one of the founders of geriatric psychiatry,” said Gay Hanna, executive director of the Center for Creative Aging, an organization that studies the relationship between creativity and healthy aging and that Dr. Cohen brought to George Washington. No one, she added, had more understanding of “phenomena happening in the brain as we age, and their effect on psychosocial and cognitive development.”
Dr. Cohen devoted much of the last decade and a half of his life to exploring the relationship between aging and creativity. He was the project director for a study, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, that assessed the impact on older people of cultural programs provided by professional artists. He invented and copyrighted a number of games — a combination of chess and Scrabble, for example — to stimulate and exercise the brains of elderly people.