Eli Robins (1921 Texas – 1994 Washington) was an American psychiatrist who played a pivotal role in establishing the way mental disorders are researched and diagnosed today.
[1] He had also seen some of its weaknesses: one of his relatives had killed himself while being treated with psychoanalytic methods for severe depression at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, and Robins himself had been misdiagnosed as having hysteria a few years before, when he actually had polio.
[1] Robins moved to the psychiatric department at Washington University in St. Louis in 1949, initially as a pharmacology fellow working in the lab of biochemist Oliver H. Lowry, author of the most cited scientific paper ever (on a method for measuring proteins).
In 1956–1957 he conducted a large-scale community-based study of suicides in St Louis which involved detailed structured interviews with people who had been in regular contact with the person beforehand.
[5] Robins formed a close working trio with Samuel Guze and George Winokur, and in the late 1950s they developed criteria sets for a 'medical model of psychiatric disorders.