Teresa Bernardez

Argentine-born psychiatrist and feminist

• Born: June 11, 1931
• Birthplace: Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Died: July 12, 2010
• Place of death: East Lansing, Michigan

As a pioneering female psychiatrist, Bernardez challenged society’s attitudes regarding women professionals in academia and medicine. She advocated for female and minority patients who were unjustly labeled as having psychological problems because of sexism, racism, and other unaddressed socioeconomic issues.

Early Life

Teresa Bernardez (teh-REH-sah behr-NAHR-dehz) was born to Spanish parents, Francisco Bernardez and Dolores Novoa, who named her after the saint reformer Santa Teresa de Avila. She was the youngest of seven children, five of whom were paternal half siblings. Bernardez later cited her mother’s Catholicism and feminist beliefs as significant influences in her life; she also credited both parents for instilling the notion that she could achieve any goal.

Until her teenage years, Bernardez aspired to a career in religion. When she discovered female sexuality and women’s rights, Bernardez abandoned this path and left the Catholic Church at age sixteen. She attended the Liceo No. 1 de Senoritas, where she received her bachelor of arts degree in 1948. She matriculated to University of Buenos Aires Medical School and was awarded her doctorate of medicine in 1956. Bernardez interned at the Hospital de Clinicas in Argentina. Because of the lack of freedom under the nation’s dictatorship, Bernardez left Argentina for Paris, France, on a one-year academic scholarship as an intern at the Hospital Vaugirard.

Life’s Work

Bernardez moved to the United States to complete her psychiatry residency in Topeka, Kansas, at the Menninger Clinic, one of only two women in her program. Although initially she was culturally isolated as the only Latina, Bernardez found a few influential female psychiatrists, slowly adjusted to life in the United States, and began studying psychoanalysis as the only female in her specialty. Bernardez became interested in studying the developmental period of female adolescence with respect to sexuality. She focused on issues such as pursuing education and a career rather than immediate motherhood, which at the time was considered a pathological decision for a teenage American girl. Bernardez served as a staff psychiatrist at the Menninger Memorial Hospital from 1960 to1965, and she assumed the same position with the department of psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation from 1965 to 1971.

Through her work at the Menninger Clinic, Bernardez volunteered to be a member of the first team to integrate healthcare efforts in Topeka’s African American community. She culturally related to the needs of the African American minority in this Caucasian-dominated city. She established the first therapy groups for mothers and adolescent females in which participants could discuss medical concerns and become empowered to break racial and socioeconomic barriers. As a result of these groups, the mental health of the community significantly improved. Bernardez later published her groundbreaking work on the connection between racism, sexism, poverty, and mental illness. She hypothesized that women were incorrectly diagnosed as mentally ill because psychoanalysts did not appropriately account for the social disadvantages of minority populations.

Because psychoanalysts were unwilling to accept Bernardez’s feminist views, she left psychoanalysis and relocated to the Department of Psychiatry at Michigan State University, in which she was a professor from 1971 to 1989. At Michigan she led research groups on gender and women’s issues for more than fifteen years and created the first group for women medical students. Her research focused on the way social restrictions fueled women’s anger. She sat on the first admissions committee that ensured that women and minorities were accepted into the university’s medical school, and she chaired the medical school’s first affirmative action committee, which recruited female and minority faculty members. Bernardez also taught courses on psychotherapy for women, trained male and female psychiatric medical residents to better understand gender issues, and created an obstetric consultation and liaison program in order to empower women during pregnancy and childbirth.

On a national level, Bernardez taught an annual course at the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) annual meeting. She was a founding member of the Association for Women Psychiatrists and the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council. She also chaired the APA’s committee on women, and in this capacity she and her colleagues fought to have inappropriate diagnoses of women removed from the 1985 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Awards for Bernardez include the Pawlowski Foundation’s Peace Award (1974), the American Medical Women’s Association First Leadership Workshop Award (1977), and Michigan State University’s Distinguished Faculty Award (1982).

Bernardez was married to Jorge Bonesatti and had one son, Diego Bonesatti. She divorced after twenty-two years of marriage because of her feminist ideals. Bernardez’s hobbies included poetry and world travel. She had a private psychiatric practice in Michigan at the time of her death on July 12, 2010, at the age of seventy-nine.

Significance

Bernardez’s determination to overcome racism and sexism throughout her career laid the foundation for women and minorities to advance in the academic and professional worlds. Her work on affirmative action resulted in pivotal documentation that helps afford all individuals equal opportunity in school admittance and the workplace. Bernardez continued her involvement in the field of psychiatry even after she retired into private practice. In her seventies, she remained outspoken about the diagnoses included in the DSM, displaying a continual commitment to the mental health of women and minorities.

Bibliography

Bernardez, Teresa. “By My Sisters Reborn.” Feminist Foremothers in Women’s Studies, Psychology and Mental Health 1(1995): 55-70. Bernardez’s autobiographical account of her influential family upbringing and the professional obstacles she overcame to become a psychiatrist and feminist.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Studies in Countertransference and Gender: Female Analyst/Male Patient in Two Cases of Childhood Trauma.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 32, no 1 (2004): 231-254. An example of Bernardez’s continued research on gender issues as part of her work with the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council.

Rankman, Angie. “Have We Got PMS All Wrong” Aprhodite Women’s Health, June, 2006, 1. Discusses the diagnosis of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and the controversy regarding its inclusion in the DSM, an issue which Bernardez fought over for many years.