Robert Pos M.D. | Canadian Psychiatrist and Research Scientist

Short biography of Robert Pos

Robert Pos was born the youngest of three children in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His mother was a psychiatric nurse prior to her marriage in 1919 to his father, a banker and stockbroker at the then Incasso Bank.

Pos got his M.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 1951 and after various internships became qualified to practice medicine in the Netherlands in 1954.

That same year he was invited by Dr. Aldwyn Stokes, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, to come to Toronto. Following a junior internship at the Toronto General Hospital, he specialized in psychiatry and obtained his qualification in 1958. In charge of the male maximum security service at the overcrowded mental hospital at Queen Street, he introduced a multidisciplinary therapeutic team and patient counsels and led the way to opening the hospital to the community in close association with the Jewish Vocational Service which was in its first year.

In 1962 he joined the Toronto General Hospital as staff psychiatrist and soon became involved in research of narco-analysis and LSD-25 in long-term exploratory psychotherapy. His long-time interest in the relationship of physiological and psychological languages led to a Visiting Lectureship in Department of Psychiatry, University of Utrecht, and then to his Ph.D. under Dr. H. C. Rümke, Professor of Psychiatry, in 1963.

Next he developed the Informational Underload Theory of Psychotic Decompensation for which Dean J. McCreary, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, awarded him the National Research Award 1964 of the Canadian Mental Health Association. This enabled him to develop a neurophysiological research laboratory in the Banting Institute, first under the neurosurgeon Dr. Ronald Tasker, then on his own. In 1966 Pos attended the Psychiatric Research Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Medicine in Moscow, as Visiting Scientist. In 1967 he became Assistant Professor and in 1968 Associate Professor.

As Chairman of the General Hospital Committee in the Faculty of Medicine Pos played a leading role in the Toronto teaching hospitals in transforming their Divisions of Psychiatry within the Departments of Medicine to independent General Hospital Departments. In 1968 he indeed became the Toronto General Hospital’s first Psychiatrist-in-Chief. As such he developed a staff of eleven full-time psychiatrists with an inpatient, outpatient, emergency, and community service, a research division and a division of psychology.

In 1973 he became Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto which he remained until 1982. In 1975-1976, he took his sabbatical year at his farm north of Owen Sound, working as Editor-in-Chief and later as Chairman of the Editorial Board on a undergraduate psychiatric textbook which was published in 1980.

In 1984 the Ontario Government transferred the MacKinnon Phillips Mental Hospital in Owen Sound, Ontario, to the General & Marine Hospital there in the expectation to empty the mental hospital and turn it into a general hospital unit. Pos became Director & Chief of Psychiatry, soon developed a psychiatric staff of nine, including a child psychiatrist and an adolescent psychiatrist, and set up a community service which eventually emptied the mental hospital. In due course he also assisted the Board of Trustees in sorting out the combined budget of the two merging hospitals.

In 1982, Pos moved to Vancouver and joined the Forensic Psychiatric Services Commission of British Columbia. Soon he became Chairman of the Task Force on Reorganization. In 1983 he became both Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Forensic Psychiatric Institute in Port Coquitlam, BC, and Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. He increased the Institute’s staff considerably and modeled its functioning along academic lines. In 1984 he became Director of the entire Adult Clinical Services of the Forensic Psychiatric Services Commission in British Columbia.

Meanwhile, Pos became involved in 16 dangerous offenders hearings leading to indeterminate sentences (including the first violent and the first sexual dangerous offender hearings in Newfoundland), 11 insanity defenses, 5 automatism defenses, and 16 other psychiatric defenses in well known criminal cases. He also participated in numerous remand and fitness hearings and was nominated or consulted in 7 school districts under the School Act of British Columbia.

Because of policy differences between Pos on the one hand, and the leadership of the Forensic Psychiatric Services Commission and the Department of Health of British Columbia on the other, he was forced to leave the Forensic Service in 1987 and started a private practice in Vancouver with emphasis on long-term reconstructive therapy. He functioned also as Psychiatric Consultant at the Vancouver Pretrial Service Centre of B.C. Corrections for some time.

While working for the Forensic Service Pos had become aware of and fascinated by the two distinct, unique ways in which forensically involved persons experience time. Early in private practice he realized, however, that this time gender duality was present in all people. He began his research in this area in earnest in the summer of 1988.

After he retired from clinical practice in September 1997, he and his spouse, Marie Becker-Pos, artist and counseling psychologist, moved back and forth between Toronto, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia until March 2004, when they settled in Vancouver. By that time, he had completed his manuscript of The Gender Beyond Sex, this website, and the 2004 e-book version of the manuscript.