Jimmie Holland, Who Cared for the Cancer Patient’s Mind, Dies at 89

Dr. Jimmie Holland, who rose from rural Texan roots to pioneer the field of psycho-oncology — treating the emotional distress of cancer patients while their medical symptoms are addressed — died Dec. 24 at her home in Scarsdale, New York. She was 89.

Her husband, Dr. James F. Holland, a chemotherapy specialist, said the cause was complications of cardiovascular disease.

With several colleagues in the mid-1970s, Jimmie Holland established a division of psychiatry at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She became the first woman to head a clinical department there and was credited with creating the first full-time psychiatry service in a major cancer hospital.

Born to high school dropouts in a farming hamlet east of Dallas, Holland was one of only three women in her 1952 medical school class. She originally hoped to be a nurse.

“In the small community in rural Texas where I grew up, I knew of no women who had become doctors,” she said.

Then her ambitions widened — she planned to be a country doctor or a pediatrician — before she gravitated to what would prove to be a groundbreaking psychiatric specialty.

She recounted several reasons for doing so: Her uncle had been institutionalized for a mental breakdown when she was 9; her first husband committed suicide when she was 27; and she was frustrated that her second husband’s oncology colleagues were focusing solely on medical treatment and not on the state of mind of patients facing an unpredictable prognosis.

In treating cancer patients’ mental well-being, Holland rejected what she called “the tyranny of positive thinking.”

A good attitude was one thing, she argued, and the idea of mind over matter might be like chicken soup — it couldn’t hurt, as long as it was coupled with competent medical care. But pep talks were not enough, she said.

“It’s bad enough to have cancer,” she told the website Medscape.com in 2015, “but when all of your family and friends are saying that you have to be positive and you have to fight this thing, and the patient is exhausted and beaten up by the treatments — it seemed to me that adding that burden to be positive was just ridiculous.” In a letter to The New York Times in 1985, Holland and a colleague, Morton Bard, wrote of cancer patients, “Should they be viewed as weak or as somehow having contributed to their own demise?”

Holland treated depression in patients undergoing treatment and anxiety in survivors, sometimes over body image after the loss of a breast or a testicle.

She urged doctors to screen for emotional distress as a vital sign, just as they do for temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure and pain. Physiological symptoms, she said, could often be relieved by antidepressants, anxiety medicine, meditation and other treatments.

In her book “The Human Side of Cancer,” written with Sheldon Lewis and published in 2000, she quoted a patient of hers as saying: “They have measured everything but my thoughts and mind. Somehow, my mental attitude, the stress, the anguish should be analyzed and studied the same as my physical condition.”

Holland was the founding president of the American Psychosocial Oncology Society and the International Psycho-oncology Society. She also taught at Weill Cornell medical school.

“For more than 40 years, Jimmie made an essential question — ‘How do people with cancer feel?’ — the center of her work,” her husband said in an email.

Dr. William Breitbart, chairman of the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department at Memorial Sloan Kettering, described Holland in a statement as “a once in a generation influencer.”

She was born Jimmie Coker on April 9, 1928, in Forney, Texas, a hamlet of about 100 people, to Clifford Coker, a cotton farmer, and the former Mary Velma Cox.

She earned a bachelor’s degree from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she found a mentor in a female biology professor. She graduated from Baylor College of Medicine in a class of 85 students.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by six children, Diane, Steven, Mary, Sally, Peter and David Holland; and nine grandchildren.

Holland taught psychiatry at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1956 to 1973; practiced at Edward J. Meyer Memorial Hospital (now the Erie County Medical Center) in Buffalo from 1958 to 1972; served in 1972 as a consultant on a joint Soviet-American schizophrenia research study in Moscow; and returned the next year to teach and practice at Montefiore Hospital of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

She joined Memorial Sloan Kettering in 1977. There, she was chief of the psychiatry service until 1996 and chairwoman of the department of psychiatry until 2003.

She edited the first textbook on psycho-oncology in 1989 and was featured on the 2015 PBS documentary “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Holland described her focus on how emotionally healthy individuals dealt with catastrophic disease as “the psychological care of the medically ill,” particularly those who had been stigmatized because they had cancer.

In the 1950s, she wrote, The Times rejected an advertisement for a women’s support group because it mentioned the words “breast” and “cancer.” She recalled, too, that “a taxi driver once refused to drive me to Memorial, saying, ‘No, ma’am, that place is for the Big C. I drive all the way around it.'”

People, she wrote, feared being fired from their jobs if they admitted to having cancer; doctors often withheld their diagnosis from their patients.

“The philosophy was that if we tell them they have cancer, they’ll give up hope, so we won’t tell them,” Holland said in 2015.

That began to change as recovery rates improved, and as prominent cancer survivors like Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller spoke openly about their illness. “One of the things that I’ve learned in 40 years is that our emotions are exactly the same,” Holland said. “They haven’t changed one iota over millennia. It’s fear. It’s worry. It’s what’s going to happen to me and what’s going to happen to my family. All of those fears are there.

“What the patient has always wanted and still wants is to know that this doctor cares about me,” she continued. “When you feel like your doctor cares, then you’re right there ready to help.”