My friend Lynn Gillis, who has died aged 96, was founding head in 1962 of the department of psychiatry and mental health at the University of Cape Town and played an integral role in changing the custodial care to a comprehensive service for the region.
He initiated groundbreaking community services and clinics, unusually led by nurses. Under his guidance a day hospital was established, and a psychiatric social club promoting continuity of care for patients in the community, with outreach provisions to destigmatise mental illness. At Valkenberg hospital and Alexandra rehabilitation centre he courageously defied apartheid segregation by integrating staff across wards.
Lynn was born to emigrant parents in Kroonstad, South Africa, a small town where his father, Julius, a dentist, grew competition prize roses as a hobby, and his mother, Annie (nee Lynn), a concert pianist, gave music lessons. This parochial background grounded Lynn’s fluent vernacular Afrikaans, a language he deemed second only to Yiddish in its rich array of metaphors and colourful curses. Perhaps too it underpinned his initiatives in community and social psychiatry. Similarly, a spell in the Johannesburg children’s fever hospital aged nine for scarlet fever primed later innovative ideas.
When the second world war broke out, he served in makeshift hospitals in northern Africa and Italy. Between 1945 and 1962 he worked at Tara hospital, a pioneering mental health facility in Johannesburg, taking a break in the 1950s to hold positions at the Maudsley hospital in London, and becoming a founding member of the Royal College of Psychiatry.
These formative experiences bore fruit when he was recruited in 1962 to fill the position of head of department of psychiatry and mental health at the University of Cape Town and first consultant at Groote Schur hospital. He remained professor of psychiatry at the university until his retirement in 1989, when he became professor emeritus.
Lynn won many awards and held esteemed positions, among them president of the SA National Council for Mental Health. He and I met in 1980 when as director of the South African Medical Research Council’s Clinical Psychiatry Research Unit he invited my husband, Julian Leff, of the British Medical Research Council Social and Community Psychiatry Unit, to participate in an extensive study of life events and ongoing precipitants of relapses in schizophrenia. Their findings revealed massive discrepancies in the different racial groups’ lived experience. We have remained fast friends since, with reciprocal annual visits between ourselves and Lynn and his wife, Shirley.
As inspirational teacher, mentor and author of numerous professional books and publications, Lynn’s many eminent trainees acknowledge his singular trusting style of leadership, which encouraged personal initiative.
Ever curious, Lynn was drawn to psychoanalysis, and in retirement pursued Buddhism, studied sculpture and created austere carvings in marble and rare woods. An avid mountaineer, he remained remarkably healthy and agile, lucid and fiercely independent to the end of his full and fulfilled professional and artistic life.
Shirley (nee Lurie), whom he married in 1950, died in 2015. Lynn is survived by their daughter, Jenny, four grandchildren, Josh, Gabrielle, Jason and Danielle, and three great-grandchildren, Nomi, Yael and Lev.
