Dane Prugh

Dane Gaskill Prugh (3 June 1918 – 6 October 1990),[1] a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, with training in pediatrics, who pioneered in demonstrating the necessity for wider knowledge, understanding, and experience in persons who evaluate such programs.[2]

His research indicated that cheerful and familiar hospital stays for children are shorter and reduce difficulties adapting to the hospital when physical surroundings. Children's prefer hospitals with more "happy" surroundings. Related studies have shown that children who have the support of family members during prolonged hospitalizations are less likely to suffer from learning problems and delinquency later on.

He is sometimes cited as a leader in developing play therapy, and of affirmative action at the University of Colorado School of Medicine (then a part of University of Colorado Denver), a school which annually names a recipient for the Dane Prugh Teaching Award.

Prugh had done psychiatry in the Medical Center (Bournewood Psychiatric Hospital?) in Brookline, then ran the inpatient unit at Rochester, New York for a number of years. Prugh argued that the problem was not so much the ineffectiveness of treatment but the inability of finding placements for the children back in the community when they were ready to leave so that the gains in mental health they had made during treatment rapidly dissipated when they became chronically hospitalized. Dane later left Rochester for Colorado.

For one year, from 1968–1969, Prugh served as President of the American Orthopsychiatric Association.[3]