Several weeks ago I was incredibly saddened by the news from a colleague and dear friend of mine, also a Duke child psychiatrist, that one of our mentors had passed away in his mid-80’s. He meant so much to me, I wish to mention and memorialize his name in my own little way in this humble esoteric blog. He was Dr. Marc (Marcelino) Amaya (with ‘Amaya y Rosas’ being his full last name).
He was one of the original child psychiatrists in a group that came down to Durham NC from Northeastern training centers to help start the department and to staff it. The other faculty was as were in all major medical centers of the last 50 years, superb instructors and fantastic clinicians that often left us rookies with our veritable mouths open at their insights.
Dr. Amaya started a complete children’s psychiatric hospital I think in the early or mid-1960’s to house what Duke could not offer on its grounds because it was private and not state affiliated and for funding issues. The Children’s Psychiatric Institute (CPI) was a fabulous training center on the level of such other state hospital affiliated and also lesser known than the more celebrated upper crust programs, but every bit as good as any of the Ivy League (Boston, NYC, Philly, etc.) centers such as the late and venerated Dr. Ralph Rabinovich of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. CPI has a short term and long term outpatient clinic, a family therapy program that was expanded by this writer and one of the veteran incredibly skilled social workers at CPI, Anne K. Parrish ACSW, LCSW, into a training program for child mental health trainees from Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill medical and graduate schools. Dr. Amaya was a superb supervisor and I always learned untold concepts, techniques, and gems at his feet so to speak. I also accompanied him to the testify in the Golden Days of Psychiatry and Psychology in this country to testify annually before the NC General Assembly (state legislature) as we would advocate for our state funded programs, but also for the private inpatient and outpatient programs at Duke and UNC! So there we would be harassing clinically and statistically the legislators (who in those days seemed to listen better..no matter their party affiliation). It was quite ironic but demonstrated the dedication that Dr. Amaya had to the delivery of mental health services to ALL children of the state and to any agency, institution, training program that was trying to provide such. His program was not his first concern in the statewide scheme of things, it was just another important part of the overall system of resources he foresaw for the state decades before some of them came into existence. He was a short man with a lyrical Hispanic accent that I as a Southwesterner could listen all day long and always feel like, when I was with him, I was a little bit ‘back home’ in the Southwest.”
The Mental Health Reform Blog 