Obituary: Joel Yager, BS, MD, (1941-2024)

On December 22, 2024, Dr. Joel Yager passed away from complications of cancer at the age of 83. To call him a beloved figure in the fields of eating disorders, psychiatry, academic medicine, and among his family and friends doesn’t begin to capture the extraordinary respect, affection, gratitude, admiration, and influence that Joel inspired in those lucky enough to know him.

Joel was born in 1941 in the Bronx, New York, to a Jewish family. While attending the High School of Music & Art with a focus on jazz piano and French horn, Joel started his first band at age 15 and played B’Mitzvahs, weddings, and gigs in the Catskills. He graduated from the College of the City of New York, experimenting with majoring in engineering and music before selecting premed. Having received the Jonas Salk full scholarship to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he met a brilliant fellow student, Eileen, who would become his wife in 1964. Joel completed his medicine internship and psychiatry residency at Einstein before serving as a Major in the US Army Medical Corp for two years. In 1973, after working at the University of California at San Diego, he was recruited at the age of 32 to direct the psychiatric residency program at UCLA, a role he held for 22 years, and later became the Medical Director of the UCLA Eating Disorders Clinic. To the collective dismay of his friends, colleagues, spiritual community, and generations of trainees, Joel then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, continuing his academic and clinical leadership, before moving to the University of Colorado in 2008, where he saw patients, wrote, and taught well into his cancer diagnosis.

Joel’s contributions to academic medicine, direct patient care, and the clinical development of nearly countless medical professionals include his hundreds of peer reviewed articles, his leadership in the American Psychiatric Association, the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training, and the Academy of Eating Disorders (the latter two of which as President), and especially his direct mentorship and encouragement of eager learners over his six decades as a physician. He was a distinguished Associate Editor and reviewer for many years for the Journal of Eating Disorders. He carried out his duties with dedication, care, and thoughtfulness, showed a deep empathy for authors, and was active up to his last days. The fact that he won five lifetime achievement awards, amidst many other laurels, seems fitting given his at least five lifetimes’ worth of teaching and service.

He was good friend to his Australian colleagues and the field of eating disorders within Australia. He advised on early and later Royal Australian and New Zealand College Eating Disorder Clinical Practice Guidelines, and his last paper with Australian co-authors appeared the day he died [1]. Exemplifying his ability to engage with people, I (ST) recall how, on an academic visit to Australia, he was asked to consult with a person experiencing a severe and highly complex form of anorexia nervosa. Within a few minutes he had established an excellent rapport and aided the person in what became a successful recovery journey.

Joel’s academic articles (he wrote 35 articles in the 3 years since his cancer diagnosis, of which 10 were published in this last year) spanned a remarkable breadth of topics and collaborations. He was known for his beautiful, concise prose, his compassion, his determination to see the whole human in the context of their illness, and for his unwavering commitment to combining heart and soul with good science.

One might think that someone so astonishingly productive and hard-working had chosen to dedicate his life exclusively to his profession. This could not be further from the truth. He glowed with pride when speaking of his 60-year marriage to Eileen and her remarkable clinical work. He cherished his son and daughter (both physicians), their spouses, and his 7 grandchildren. Throughout his career, he regularly hosted house staff and colleagues for music evenings at his home. At Joel’s memorial service, his son noted that his father embodied the values “to love, to learn, to serve, and to laugh.” His daughter poignantly shared that Joel always made a person feel listened to, valued, and loved, and that at the end of his life, he had no regrets and felt he had achieved all his life goals except seeing all the grandchildren grow up to adulthood. His best friend called him “delusionally happy and unflaggingly cheerful” as well as the “best and most talented person I’ve ever known.” No one could ask to be more beautifully spoken of after his passing than Joel was.

In one of his later essays, Joel pondered death [2], paraphrasing Shneidman [3]:

In a good death, the dying person is free from physical pain; dignified; lucid; graceful; attended by loved ones with amicability and love and with flowers, pictures, and music for the dying scene.

His family assured us that this indeed characterized many of Joel’s final days of life. We salute with deepest gratitude Joel’s unparalleled contributions to the field of eating disorders, psychiatry, and medicine as a whole. We mourn the loss of a wise, candid, pragmatic, hilarious, generous, attentive, open-hearted, open-minded, inquisitive, principled, and loving friend and colleague.

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The authors declares that they have no competing interests.

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