By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2006; B07
Mauricio Goldenberg, 90, an innovative Argentine psychiatrist who brought many reforms in mental health treatment to Latin America, died Sept. 12 of cancer at his home in Washington.
Dr. Goldenberg reduced the stigma attached to mental health treatment and helped bring psychiatry into the social and medical mainstream in Argentina. He was forced into exile in 1976 during the so-called "Dirty War" of the 1970s and '80s, in which Argentina's rightist government launched a campaign against dissidents and intellectuals.
A Buenos Aires native, Dr. Goldenberg graduated from the University of Buenos Aires's medical school in 1945. After briefly studying in France, he returned to his hometown, entered private practice and began teaching psychiatry at his alma mater's medical school. His experience taught him to look at mental illness as a treatable disorder rather than as a shameful condition that could not be changed.
In 1956, Dr. Goldenberg established a psychiatry department at a public hospital in a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It was the first general hospital in Latin America with a psychiatric ward. Until then, most mental health patients in Argentina were confined to asylums with little hope for treatment and recovery.
Dr. Goldenberg refused to use straitjackets on his patients and initiated the practice of community-based services in neighborhood clinics. He also pioneered the use of art therapy and other creative exercises. His ideas, which were advanced for any part of the world at the time, were considered revolutionary in Latin America.
His hospital was soon treating 40,000 patients a year, free of charge, and other hospitals across the country followed his lead, marking a turning point in making mental health programs more widely available.
In 1962, Dr. Goldenberg became an adviser to the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization, both of which gave wider currency to his ideas. Additionally, he played a role in designing Cuba's mental health facilities in the early 1970s.
While maintaining his teaching career, clinical practice and hospital work, Dr. Goldenberg was named director of mental health for the city of Buenos Aires in 1967. In that position, he developed a comprehensive plan for mental health services, including community centers throughout the city.
When a right-wing junta seized control of the Argentine government in 1976, psychiatrists were seen by the new regime as subversive. Exiled, Dr. Goldenberg fled to Caracas, where he taught at the Central University of Venezuela and had a private practice.
Many other psychiatrists who had trained under Dr. Goldenberg also were banished from Argentina, which allowed Goldenberg's ideas to spread across South America and to Spain. (The diaspora of Argentine psychiatrists, including references to Dr. Goldenberg, is the subject of "Maria de Buenos Aires," an "operita" by tango composer Astor Piazzolla.)
Two of Dr. Goldenberg's children were among those who "disappeared" and were killed by government-sponsored groups during Argentina's Dirty War. Carlos Goldenberg vanished in 1976 and Liliana Goldenberg in 1982. Another son, Hernan Goldenberg, died in 1994.
After Raúl Alfonsín was elected president of Argentina in 1983, Dr. Goldenberg returned to his homeland as a professor emeritus at the University of Buenos Aires. He established a second home in Washington in 1986 and made it his full-time residence in 1999.
In July, Argentina's health ministry dedicated the psychiatry department at the hospital where Dr. Goldenberg had begun his groundbreaking work 50 years before.
Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Isabel Fernandez de Goldenberg of Washington; a daughter, Dr. Isabel A. Goldenberg of Washington, who is director of student health services at George Washington University; and four grandchildren.