Former UA vice president dies at 56

By Melanie Klein
Arizona Summer Wildcat
June 26, 1996

Dr. Allan Beigel, former UA vice president for university relations and development and a national and international leader in psychiatry, died of a brain tumor Saturday in his Tucson home. He was 56.

The tumor was discovered during Beigel's sabbatical at Harvard's psychiatry department in the 1994-1995 academic year. He was also serving as scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at the time.

Beigel joined the University of Arizona as an assistant professor in 1970. In 1983, then President Henry Koffler named Beigel vice president of university relations and development.

As vice president, he developed university relations into a stronger and more effective unit, a UA press release stated. With his help, the UA foundation launched its first capital campaign and exceeded its goals by nearly $100 million.

Known best for his contributions to the field of psychiatry, Beigel was also a pioneer in providing mental health care in Southern Arizona. He was director of the Southern Arizona Mental Health Center from 1970-1983 and chief of psychiatry at Pima County Hospital from 1970-1976.

He is cited for taking mental health care in Southern Arizona to the leading edge and beginning the trend towards community-based mental health treatment. This approach is now widely used throughout the country, as stated in a press release from Sharon Kha, special assistant to the UA president.

Beigel is credited with proposing a law that would set legal criteria for commitment to a mental health care institution. The proposal provided due process proceedings. He is also credited with drafting new laws that classified public drunkenness as an illness rather than a crime and making it illegal for mental health care providers to have sex with their patients.

Born in Hamilton, Ohio, Beigel graduated with honors from Harvard College and earned his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

He studied psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and worked at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., before moving to Tucson in 1970.

Beigel was a member of the American Psychiatric Association, the National Council of Community Mental Health Centers and the American College of Psychiatrists, where he served as president from 1990-1991. He also served on the executive committee of the World Psychiatric Association from 1989-1996, and was a chair member on the Psychiatry and Public Policy committees and the American Medical Association Section on Psychiatry.

Beigel is survived by his wife, Nancy Sher, and their twin daughters, Micaela and Eliana; former wife Joan Kaye Beigel and their two daughters, Jennifer, of Cave Junction, Ore., and Jillian, of Chicago; and a brother, Herbert, of New York.

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