By: E&P Staff Lucy Freeman, 88, a New York Times reporter noted for her coverage of psychiatry and mental health issues, died Wednesday at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale in the Bronx, N.Y., from complications of Alzheimer's disease.
Freeman joined the Times reporting staff in 1940, a time when few women held such positions. Many of her initial assignments were society features, but she made her mark on the news side in 1947 with an award-winning story on the destruction of two ships carrying munitions in Galveston Bay, Texas.
After she began her own psychoanalysis in the late 1940s, Freeman began to persuade Times editors to carry stories on the rise of psychiatry and the preservation of Sigmund Freud's personal papers. For four years she reported on welfare, the social stigma of mental illness, and improved treatments for schizophrenia.
Freeman's first book, "Fight Against Fears," published in 1951, chronicled her own experience as a psychoanalysis patient struggling to overcome her excessive shyness. She was also the author of 77 other books, among them mystery novels and memoirs, as well as detailed studies of Freud.
In her free time, Freeman played poker and enjoyed hosting parties at her Manhattan apartment.
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