"To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides." -- David Viscott
David Viscott (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.
"If you could get up the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed.""In the end, the only people who fail are those who do not try.""Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.""No one is so old as to think he cannot live one more year.""Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.""The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.""There is some place where your specialties can shine. Somewhere that difference can be expressed. It's up to you to find it, and you can.""This is really America in therapy, people trying to get themselves together and be whole.""Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure.""To fail is a natural consequence of trying, To succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying again.""To love and to be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.""You must begin to think of yourself as becoming the person you want to be."
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 signature style was to attempt to isolate 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.
Along with psychiatric advice, he would fall back on his medical knowledge to regularly devote entire segments of radio to answering medical questions. During these segments he would give medical advice. Many of the questions answered had to do with pharmacological advice. This was unique in the world of talk radio.
Viscott's popularity peaked in the early 1990s, and then fell sharply. A separation from his wife, 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.