ABOUT THE FOUNDATION
The Viola W. Bernard Foundation was established initially in 1968 as the Tappanz Foundation to provide seed money for innovative mental health programs with a particular emphasis on families and children.
The mission of the Viola W. Bernard Foundation remains to support innovative programs that address the interplay between social conditions and the psychological health of children and families. The Foundation is a $5 million estate making grants of $200,000 each year.
Following Dr. Bernard's leadership in the field of community and social psychiatry, the grants we support emphasize individual psychosocial services as part of larger programs in community psychiatry. In addition, we consider research programs in our area of interest.
Recognizing that new social situations create new psychological needs, we anticipate grant requests for mental health programs that evolve out of emerging issues and changing needs, requiring innovative approaches: for instance, the transition from welfare to work, from dependency to independence, from delinquency and rebellion to cooperation. Opportunities for grant support continuously emerge around foci of social conflict that often involve the police, school support and social agencies.
ABOUT DR. VIOLA BERNARD
Dr. Viola W. Bernard (1907-1998) dedicated her life to a conception of psychiatry that broadened the traditional definition of patient-therapist psychiatry to encompass the impact of the social environment on the individual.
Graduating from Cornell Medical College in 1936, she began her psychoanalytic and psychiatric training at Columbia University, with which she remained affiliated for the rest of her life. Dr. Bernard brought her skills to bear on the social problems surrounding her, pioneering the field of community and social psychiatry, in which she led psychiatrists in utilizing their training to address the psychological problems embedded in the social environment. For instance, she co-authored a major paper on the psychological effects of the nuclear arms race, and another on the psychological effects of racism. Concerned about the psychoanalytic community's limited reach, she worked tirelessly to broaden the access of disadvantaged communities to the skills of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
She focused considerable energy on children's mental health and led efforts to help adopted and foster children become better integrated into their new surroundings.
Her psychiatric concerns mirrored her societal and political efforts, and these included her opposition to McCarthyism in the United States in the1950s, rescuing children from Nazi Europe in the 1930s and 1940s through the Wagner-Rogers Bill, and other national efforts. (See PBS special , "THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: AMERICA & THE HOLOCAUST.")
In addition to her efforts to improve the society in which she lived, she was a leader in the mainstream psychiatric movement, serving as Vice President of the American Psychiatric Association.
Dr. Bernard served as a distinguished professor of psychoanalysis and professor emeritus at Columbia University, where she founded the School of Community Psychiatry. Dr. Bernard's archives are housed at the Columbia University School of Public Health, and contain 450 collated volumes, as well audio and video records, on the social history of New York City and national programs of social change, in addition to her psychiatric work, research, philanthropy, and biographical and personal papers. Selected items from the archive are on special display at Columbia University through January of 2005 (available here).
Some of her work is also archived at the NIH's National Library of Medicine. Among the many awards she received for her work, she was honored by the American Psychiatric Association with both its Distinguished Service Award (1983) and its Special Presidential Commendation (1986), by the American College of Psychiatrists with its Distinguished Service Award (1986), and by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine with its Daniel's Award (1985).
