In 1954, at the age of 29 and with no previous post-residency fellowship or tenure-track appointment, he became a full professor and chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.
From 1969 to 1989, he served as chair of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.
West's work on brainwashing techniques allowed him to exonerate U.S. servicemen under suspicion of treason for making false confessions during the Korean War era.
West was born in Brooklyn, New York or Madison, Wisconsin to a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant father and a mother who taught piano.
[2][3] Thereafter, he completed his residency at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of Cornell University on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1952.
"[6] Cornell University, where West completed his residency in psychiatry, was an MKUltra institution and the site of the Human Ecology Fund.
They expected that the drug would trigger a state similar to musth; instead, the animal began to have seizures 5 minutes after LSD was administered.
[16] Following the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas in 1963, his assassin Jack Ruby was held in an isolation cell in police custody.
West was appointed as Ruby's psychiatrist, and pronounced him psychotic and delusional, and suggested further interrogation under the influence of sodium thiopental and hypnosis.
[17][18] West disclosed his treatment of National Football League flanker and University of Oklahoma alumnus Lance Rentzel after he was arrested twice (in 1966 and 1970) for indecent exposure to young girls in the epilogue of When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow, the athlete's 1972 memoir.
Noting that "it is most unusual for a psychiatrist to permit his relationship with a patient to become public knowledge," West acknowledged that Rentzel "had many injuries, including a number of severe concussions," presaging contemporary medicine's greater understanding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among American football players.
[1] However, West's son John would later assert in a 2009 memoir that he helped his father end his life at the latter's choice by using prescription medication due to the terminal illness.