Michael Beaubrun, M.D., 1924-2002
Professor Michael Beaubrun, WFMH President from 1972 to 1974, died at his home in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on 20 December 2002. He would have been 78 years old on the 24th of that month. During his lifetime he was an outstanding figure in mental health in the Caribbean region.
Dr. Beaubrun remained professionally active almost to the time of his death, not closing his private psychiatric practice until July 2002. He had also continued his involvement with the Caribbean Institute on Alcoholism and Other Drug Problems (CARIAD), which held its twenty-eighth consecutive summer training program this year. On 24 September he was presented with his nation’s 2002 Republic Day Award by President Arthur N. R. Robinson for his outstanding contribution to the alleviation of alcohol and illegal drug addiction. This was the culmination of a long list of national and international awards for his contributions to the field and to mental health care in general.
He was marked as outstanding from early life. At the age of 17 he won a scholarship which took him to Edinburgh University in Scotland to study medicine. His stay at Edinburgh led later to a meeting with Professor Morris Carstairs, whom he eventually succeeded as WFMH President. It was also the springboard for a distinguished career, a high point of which was his tenure as founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Mona, Kingston, Jamaica. Established in 1965, it was conceived as a unifying professional force among the peoples of the fourteen Caribbean nations it would serve.
Michael and I first met at a conference of the Interamerican Council of Psychiatric Associations in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1970. We met again at a meeting of the Caribbean Federation for Mental Health (CFMH) in August 1971 in Paramaribo, Surinam. I was there representing WFMH. Michael was there as CFMH past president and the meeting’s chair. It was at this point that Morris Carstairs recruited him as his successor, to be nominated as WFMH President at the November 1971 Hong Kong Board meeting. It was in Surinam, also, that I accepted Michael’s invitation to be a visiting professor in his department at UWI during February and March 1972, an appointment which was renewed for several years. It thus happened that I was on the scene at the very beginning of his tenure as WFMH President, and became a member of an administrative committee he formed to help oversee Federation activities. He returned to Trinidad due to advancing glaucoma in 1974, after which he was succeeded as President by Prof. Tsung-yi Lin.
Michael became the WFMH leader at a difficult moment in its history. It had suffered financial problems with the closure of its Geneva office in 1967. In 1968 Morris Carstairs took over as a “working president,” combining the functions of president and chief operating officer (later called Secretary General) in his University of Edinburgh office. Michael did the same, and from the beginning of 1972 until his 1974 departure for Trinidad, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica was the center of WFMH activities and a dominant mental health presence in the Caribbean.
Michael Beaubrun was a truly distinguished citizen of the Caribbean and of the larger world. He was a “working president” of whom our Federation can be proud. He will be missed.
– Prof. Eugene B. Brody
Past President and Secretary General, WFMH (1981-1999)