Marie Nyswander was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst known for developing and popularizing the use of methadone to treat heroin addiction.
10 Facts About Marie Nyswander
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Marie Nyswander's father, James Nyswander, was a mathematics professor and her mother was noted health educator Dorothy Bird Nyswander; they divorced soon after her birth, and Nyswander followed her mother to Berkeley, Salt Lake City, and New York City.
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Marie Nyswander graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1937 and trained as a physician and surgeon at the Cornell University medical school until 1944; while at Cornell, she was briefly married to anatomy instructor Charles Berry.
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In turn, Marie Nyswander had become frustrated by the high relapse rate of her addicted patients, a factor that prepared her to find a non-psychological explanation for their addiction.
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Dole and Marie Nyswander began their research by observing the effects of different narcotics on addicts, and discovered that morphine and methadone led to quite different behaviors.
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Dole and Marie Nyswander soon set up a local program for treating addicts with methadone, and similar programs eventually became widespread around the country and around the world.
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Marie Nyswander died in 1986 of cancer, possibly caused by her lifelong addiction to cigarettes.
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Marie Nyswander is the author or co-author of a number of books and papers:.
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Subsequent to this work, Marie Nyswander coauthored many other papers on heroin addiction and methadone treatment.
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Marie Nyswander was the co-recipient with her spouse Vincent Dole of the first annual award of the National Drug Abuse Conference in 1978.