The Department of Psychiatry is sad to share the news of the death on March 4, 2014 of John Wayne Mason, M.D., professor emeritus of psychiatry. John was a pioneering scientist who helped to establish "psychoneuroendocrinology" as an important field of research within psychiatry.
At the time he was recruited to Yale in 1977, John was already one of the world’s leading scientists studying stress. After graduating from Indiana University Medical School, he was recruited to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There, he joined a remarkable group of scientists who made fundamental contributions to many areas in neuroscience. John built on the observations of Hans Selye who first described the stimulation of cortisol release by stress, by recognizing how stressor characteristics such as uncontrollability and unpredictabilty could modify the stress response, and was the first to recognize the both the bidirectionality of the stress response as well as the importance of individual variability in stress responses – concepts that later proved essential to understanding why stress exposure could result in many different consequences and illnesses. John further advanced the field by describing both neural and psychological mechanisms linking stress to the release of cortisol and other hormones in rodents, non-human primates, and humans. Many of his studies from this era are considered classics. For example, with Joseph Brady, he characterized the tendency of stressed “executive monkeys” to develop stomach ulcers, establishing an early link between mind and body. In another study, he characterized the relationship between blood cortisol levels and coping strategies in a platoon of U.S. “Green Beret” behind enemy lines in Vietnam shortly before an anticipated ambush. Besides Dr. Brady, his collaborators from this era included Peter Bourne (a former U.S. “Drug Czar” and former Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations), David Hamberg (former President of the Carnegie Corporation), Edward Sachar (former Psychiatry Chair at Columbia University), and William E. (“Biff”) Bunney (Senior Associate Dean at UC Irvine). As one of the leading figures in “psycho-somatic” medicine, he encountered Dr. Morton Reiser, the Yale Psychiatry Chair and another leader in this field, who recruited him to Yale.
Upon arriving at Yale, John established a laboratory at the West Haven Division of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System that conducted the first modern “biomarker” studies of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). With Earl Giller, Tom Kosten, Laurie Harkness, Robert Ostroff, and others, John’s lab described relative suppression of cortisol levels and elevated levels of norepinephrine in urine samples collected laboriously over 24 hours in veterans with PTSD. Dr. Mason was the first researcher to suggest that subtle differences in multiple biomolecules and hormones would best classify and distinguish different syndromes, and in this manner anticipated modern bioanalytic approaches including multivariate and clustering analyses. With Rachel Yehuda, Sheila Wang, and Steven Southwick, he went on to begin to characterize mechanisms underlying disturbances in the function of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis associated with PTSD. John retired from the full-time faculty in 1991.
John’s research established biological validation for the adjustment problems of soldiers who returned from the Vietnam War and contributed to the establishment of the PTSD diagnosis in 1980. It also contributed to locating the Clinical Neuroscience Division of the VA National Center for PTSD, the first large scale PTSD neurobiological research initiative, at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System and Yale.
John was a humble, quiet, and deeply religious man who had a substantial scientific and clinical impact. He will be remembered for his kindness, generosity, and good will towards his colleagues as well as for his groundbreaking thinking, meticulous scientific organization and intellectual honesty. He is deeply missed by his friends and colleagues. We wish his family comfort at this difficult time.
- Submitted by Drs. John Krystal, Steven Southwick, and Rachel Yehuda.