Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, Phoenix House Founder, Dies at 87

Raised in Flushing, Queens, he graduated from Jamaica Excessive College; earned a bachelor’s diploma in 1956 from Lafayette School in Easton, Pa., the place he majored in biology and minored in psychology; and acquired a medical diploma from what’s now the State College of New York Downstate Medical Middle in Brooklyn in 1960.

Dr. Rosenthal’s first marriage, to Ellen Slosberg Nagy, resulted in divorce. He married Dr. Simms, a psychotherapist, in 1990. Along with her, he’s survived by three youngsters from his first marriage, David Rosenthal, Claudia Plepler and Alexis Proceller; and 7 grandchildren.

Dr. Rosenthal’s imaginative and prescient of therapy via what he known as “dynamic analytic psychiatry” in group remedy, quite than in conventional one-on-one psychotherapy, was impressed by the California-based drug therapy and self-help group Synanon. He realized its methods via commentary and participation, and he utilized them whereas serving in Navy hospitals on Staten Island and in Oakland, Calif., within the mid-Sixties.

He was struck by the way in which veterans getting back from the Vietnam Conflict with drug and alcohol issues hardly ever acquired therapy earlier than being dishonorably discharged. After going via Synanon’s group-therapy boot camp, he stated, practically two-thirds had been in a position to return to lively obligation. (By the Seventies, nevertheless, Synanon had grow to be an insular, cultlike enterprise.)

Employed by Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration, Dr. Rosenthal was ultimately elevated to deputy commissioner for rehabilitation at New York Metropolis’s Habit Providers Company. He established Phoenix Home whereas in that job, then spun it off as a personal nonprofit.

“Individuals who come into Phoenix Home are basically strangers to themselves,” he advised Life journal in 2009. “We give them the help they should share their harmful secrets and techniques, to shed their guilt, to purge their rage, and to unlock their potential.”

“This,” he added, “is change for all times.”

Such change might be wrenching, he acknowledged, which he stated was one of many causes he had chosen to concentrate on psychiatry.