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Stanley Fausst Yolles was the second director of the National Institute of Mental Health from 1964 to 1970. His advocacy of more lenient drug laws, emphasizing treatment rather than punishment, brought him into conflict with the administration of President Richard M. Nixon and led to Yolles racing to resign before he was fired.

Yolles was born in New York City to Rose Fausst and Louis Yolles, a milliner and dress maker respectively. Yolles attended Brooklyn College, Harvard University and New York University, earning a medical degree from the last in 1951. He also earned a master of public health degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1957. Always interested in public health, Yolles started out researching the control of parasitic diseases but switched to medicine and psychiatry when "I could no longer be satisfied with a one-to-one relationship with a microscope". Work with drug addicts in Lexington, Kentucky in the early 1950s convinced him of the wrongness of treating addicts as criminals rather than patients. As director of NIMH he made a priority of changing attitudes toward addiction and advocated more lenient marijuana laws. Another priority was increasing the number of community mental health centers across the United States, avoiding the practice of sending patients to centralized catchment facilities where they are completely set apart from their families and communities.

In 1965, Yolles supported the production of a documentary about community mental health centers called "Bold New Approach", taken from a line in a speech by the late President John F. Kennedy advocating a national community health program.

Yolles married fellow medical researcher (and later fellow physician) Tamarath Knigin while they were both researching malaria in the Caribbean in 1942. Though their work often kept them apart during their careers, they managed to have two daughters. After Yolles left the NIMH, he and his wife went to work at the medical school of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she became associate dean while he was chairman of the psychiatry department. He was also director of the Long Island Research Institute. He retired at the end of 1981, becoming professor emeritus at the university. She died in 1985, and he died on 12 January 2001.

I felt I had to speak out against stupid, punitive laws.

[on punitive marijuana laws] I know of no clearer instance in which the punishment for an infraction of the law is more harmful than the crime.

Quotes

Stanley F. Yolles

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