22.04.2025
“A light smile on the face…” Psychiatrist Cyril Höschl dies at 75
“I tried to tell people that psychiatric patients – with rare exceptions – don’t bite and don’t kill. To some extent, I think that message got through. But you have to keep blowing on it.” This is how psychiatrist Cyril Höschl, founding member of the Learned Society, summed up his life’s mission last year when he received the Neuron Award. On Monday 21 April 2025, he passed away from multiple system atrophy, aged 75.
Photo by Neuron Foundation
In his research, Professor Höschl focused on biological psychiatry, psychopharmacology, neuroendocrinology, and neuroscience. As a young scientist, he and his colleagues developed methods to use endocrine processes for diagnostic purposes. He was the author of a key Czech textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychiatry, as well as several other fundamental scientific works. He founded the journal Psychiatrie and served on the editorial boards of leading international journals in the field.
Last year, the Neuron Foundation honoured him with the Neuron Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science. The chairman of the foundation’s scientific board, Jan Konvalinka, remarked at the time:
“We’re not nominating Professor Höschl for inventing a new antidepressant, but for his systematic, lifelong effort to destigmatise psychiatric illness, to help people feel less afraid to seek help when struggling with mental health. At the same time, for his great contribution to the reform of mental healthcare and to the education of future doctors. In doing so, Cyril Höschl improved life for us all.”
Cyril Höschl gave countless lectures, wrote popular science articles, and organised many initiatives to help the general public understand psychiatry and its concepts. After 1989, he became the first president of the European Psychiatric Association from Central and Eastern Europe. He also succeeded in reforming the Third Faculty of Medicine at Charles University, turning it into a respected institution. His life’s work culminated in the founding of the National Institute of Mental Health in Klecany, a centre uniting research, education, and treatment.
In a column for Reflex magazine last July, he commented on his rapidly advancing illness:
“If I may offer one last piece of advice, let it be this: your greatest support will always be a close circle of friends, loved ones, and humour. With humour, you can endure almost anything – though it requires an innate, at least minimal, sense of it. And yes, that includes dark humour. I imagine a boy at a funeral asking the priest for the Wi-Fi password. The priest scolds him: ‘Please, show some respect for the dead!’ And the boy replies: ‘All lowercase?’”
“So if you ask me how I feel now, I’d say: like in that joke where the doctor tells the patient, ‘The time you have left is ten.’ – ‘Ten what? Ten hours? Ten years? Ten months?’ And the doctor answers: ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five…’”
“A light smile on the face…”
Thank you, Cyril Höschl, for the countless inspiring encounters and for everything you did for psychiatric care and public understanding!