George Gardos, MD passed away on 28 September 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts at the age of 81. He became a member of the ACNP in 1987. George was born in Hungary and fled Soviet oppression during the Hungarian Revolution to the United Kingdom. He attended medical school at Saint Bartholomews Hospital (University of London). After an internship in England, he was an Assistant in Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Salisbury General Hospital in South Africa. He then emigrated to the United States and worked with Alberto DiMascio, a Secretary/Treasurer of the ACNP, and then did his psychiatric residency at Boston State Hospital and the Beth Israel Hospital. In the 1970s he joined the staff at McLean Hospital and began working with Jonathan Cole, one of the founders and an early President of the ACNP and a pioneer in clinical psychopharmacology. Jonathan also became a mentor of mine in the mid 1970’s shortly after I started at McLean Hospital. George held the ranks of Associate Clinical Professor and Associate Professor of Psychiatry (part-time) at Harvard Medical School before retiring. He also served as Chief of Psychiatry at Cushing’s Hospital and was a consultant at Boston State Hospital.

George was a skilled and caring physician who had a tremendous knowledge of the benefits and hazards of first-generation antipsychotics. Working with Jonathan Cole, they published on the risks and course of tardive dyskinesia (TD) which was a particular threat with continued use of the earliest antipsychotics. The risk of tardive dyskinesia appears lower with the second generation agents but by no means are these agents devoid of such effects. Gardos and Cole published a series of seminal papers that dispelled a number of myths about the disorder. One was that TD had a uniformly chronic and downhill course. They conducted elegant follow-up studies of 5 and 7 years that were published in Neuropsychopharmacology (1988) and J Clinical Psychopharmacology (1988) in which they reported that TD did not invariably have a worsening course over time. Rather, the course was variable. In addition, they reported on risks based on gender, age, and diagnosis (schizophrenia versus affective disorders). These are classic papers that have guided our approach to the management of TD to this day.

In addition to his clinical acumen, George Gardos was an exemplary professional colleague—amiable, intelligent, kind, sensitive, and collaborative. He was an excellent teacher—incisive and comprehensive in his presentations.

He was a dedicated family man. He married Euphemia Gardner in 1972 and she survives him, as do two daughters and sons-in-law, one son and daughter-in-law, and eight grandchildren.