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David Viscott, MD (May 24, 1938 - October 10, 1996), was an American psychiatrist, author, businessman, and media personality. He was a graduate of Dartmouth (1959), Tufts Medical School and taught at University Hospital in Boston. He started a private practice in psychiatry in 1968 and later moved to Los Angeles in 1979 where he was a professor of psychiatry at UCLA. He founded and managed the Viscott Center for Natural Therapy in Beverly Hills, Newport Beach and Pasadena, California. In 1980 Viscott began presenting his own full-time show on talk radio, and was notably one of the first psychiatrists to do so (talk station KABC). He screened telephone calls and gave considerable amount of free psychological counselling to his on-air "patients." In 1987 Viscott briefly had his own live syndicated TV show, Getting in Touch with Dr. David Viscott, providing much the same service as his radio show. In fact, the shows ran concurrently. In the late 1980s he had a weekly call-in therapy television program on KNBC in Los Angeles early Sunday morning after Saturday Night Live. Viscott's style of counseling was hard-hitting yet compassionate, and he often isolated an individual's source of emotional problems in a very short amount of time. Many of his books were of a self-help nature, written to assist the individual with his/her own examination of life. His autobiography, The Making of a Psychiatrist, was a best-seller, a Book of the Month Club Main Selection, and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Viscott's popularity seemed to peak in the early 1990s, and then fell sharply. A divorce, followed by declining health, occurred at about the same time that he left the air waves. He died in 1996 of heart failure complicated by a diabetic condition. At the time, he was living alone in Los Angeles. He is survived by his four children, Elizabeth, Penelope, Jonathan, and Melanie.
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