Dr. Myron Stocking, a Minneapolis pediatric psychiatrist who believed that talk therapy had been wrongly shunted aside in recent years, trained many medical residents at the University of Minnesota.
Stocking, who opened a private practice in Minneapolis in 1977, died of a stroke at his Minneapolis home on Oct. 3. He was 77.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1951, and in 1955 from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, he served in the Navy as a psychiatrist in Oakland, Calif.
He headed the Child Psychiatry Department at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston and at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.
Family members say he was drawn to the Twin Cities in 1977 to start a private practice because he also was hired to serve as a clinical professor for the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.
"He had a wonderful capacity to sense complexities and deal with them," said Dr. Tom Mackenzie, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and the training director for the medical school's residents in psychiatry.
And he was outspoken, if practitioners "were not living up to their professional obligations, or practiced what didn't make sense," said Mackenzie.
He recalled a patient 20 years ago who others believed should have electroconvulsive therapy, also known as electroshock therapy. Stocking made it clear to others that he believed it was wrong in this case, said Mackenzie.
