Dr. Manuel Trujillo, who as Bellevue Hospital’s chief of psychiatry initiated innovative mental health programs that helped New Yorkers cope with trauma in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center, died on Oct. 2 in El Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain. He was 80.
His daughter Cristina Trujillo-Lilly said that he had been in Spain on vacation and died of a stroke.
In the days after the attack, Dr. Trujillo helped shape Bellevue’s mental health response. Counselors reached out to grieving families, baffled children, shellshocked rescue workers and guilt-ridden survivors. A team of psychiatrists was deployed to the 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, which served as a critical response and support center.
Bellevue’s emergency-room physicians wept as relatives arrived seeking news of survivors who were being treated there. Families and friends taped photographs of missing workers, police officers and firefighters to walls and fences.
Dr. Manuel Trujillo in an undated photo. He was a key figure in shaping Bellevue Hospital’s mental health response after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
Credit: Mariana Silvia Eliano/Cover, via Getty Images
“In my worst nightmare,” Dr. Trujillo told The New York Times at the time, “I would never have considered this would happen.”
“Emotionally, it had a significant impact,” he wrote in his Spanish-language book “Psicología Para Después de una Crisis” (“Psychology After a Crisis”), published in 2002. “It brought me closer to the patients, understanding that being a doctor or being part of a hospital isn’t just about providing a one-off service, but that it’s an institution that belongs to the people.”
According to a 2014 report in the journal Annals of Global Health, Manhattan residents who lived south of Canal Street at the time of the attacks and who enrolled in a health registry had a 12.6 percent prevalence of probable post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition associated mostly with older, female, Hispanic New Yorkers who were divorced and had lower education and income levels. The overall rate ranged from 6.2 percent for police officers to 21.4 percent for nonuniformed volunteers.
“As a Spaniard, he had a particular affection for the Latino community and helped to be inclusive,” Dr. Andrew W. Brotman, who was Bellevue’s executive vice president in 2001, said in an interview.
Dr. Luis Marcos, who was president and chief executive of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation at the time and is now a professor of psychiatry at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, wrote in an email, “Dr. Trujillo immediately organized and personally participated in several daily open two-hour group psychotherapy sessions, in several locations downtown, for victims, families and rescue workers.”
Families and friends taped photographs of missing workers, police officers and firefighters to walls and fences at Bellevue.
Credit: Darren McCollester/Getty Images
In an email, Ms. Trujillo-Lilly, Dr. Trujillo’s daughter, said that he “went every day with a team of doctors and social workers to speak with those involved in first response as well as the family members of the missing.” She added: “He wrote a book about trauma as a result of what he lived through, helping others through their pain. It was about how to survive stress in crisis, which served as the basis for how to treat similar situations like the train explosions in Madrid in 2004 (coincidentally he was in Madrid then and was called upon to lend a hand there, too) or the pandemic in 2020.”
As director of psychiatry at Bellevue from 1991 to 2008, Dr. Trujillo advanced the role of neuroimaging in diagnosing and treating psychiatric disorders, expanded the hospital’s substance abuse detoxification program, and created a program in public and global psychiatry at N.Y.U.
He also helped develop comprehensive psychiatric care in emergency rooms. And he contributed to discussions that led to the creation of the state’s first involuntary outpatient program to provide psychiatric treatment and housing to homeless people with mental illnesses.
Dr. Trujillo told The Times in 1994 that the standard for involuntary treatment should be higher than being a danger to one’s self. “Danger to self has usually been interpreted by doctors to mean violence to one’s self,” he said. “But insidious neglect can be equally lethal.”
Manuel Trujillo Pérez-Lánzac was born on Sept. 28, 1945, in Zaragoza, Spain, to Manuel Trujillo de los Rios, a veterinarian, and Ana Perez-Lanzac. He and his three siblings were raised in Seville.
After earning a degree from the Colegio San Antonio Claret in Seville in 1962, he received a scholarship to the University of Seville’s medical school, where he graduated in 1968 while completing his mandatory military service over three summers.
In 1969, he married Dr. Karin Siljestrom, whom he had met in medical school. Since psychiatry was not a popular profession in Spain at the time, the couple soon moved to New York, where he started his residency at Pilgrim State Hospital (now Pilgrim Psychiatric Center) on Long Island and at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where he was chief resident.
“He liked psychiatry because he found it to be an intellectually stimulating endeavor, a combination of philosophy, history and human behavior,” Ms. Trujillo-Lilly said.
Dr. Trujillo in 2001. He was the director of psychiatry at Bellevue from 1991 to 2008.
Credit: Frances Roberts for The New York Times
In addition to Ms. Trujillo-Lilly, Dr. Trujillo is survived by his wife; another daughter, Dr. Karin Trujillo; a son, Carlos Trujillo; four grandchildren; and two sisters, Mariana Trujillo Perez-Lanzac and Maribel Trujillo Perez-Lanzac.
Dr. Trujillo taught at Columbia University, the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and N.Y.U. In the early 1990s, he headed the Association of Hispanic Mental Health Professionals.
He was also chief of service at South Beach Psychiatric Center on Staten Island from 1976 to 1977; directed the evaluation and research program at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan from 1981 to 1985; and was medical director of Holliswood Hospital in Queens from 1985 to 1989.
“His legacy has been very significant in medicine and psychology,” Dr. Marcos of N.Y.U. said, “particularly in the areas of psychotherapy, cultural sensitivity in psychiatry and the understanding of the relation between brain waves and imaging and mental disorders.”
Dr. Trujillo’s help in healing New Yorkers grief-stricken by the damage inflicted by the terrorists who attacked the twin towers was “extremely instrumental in the development of the mental health component of the World Trade Center Health Center for survivors,” Dr. Joan Reibman, director of the WTC Environmental Health Center at the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, said in an email.
“He helped with the recruitment of the first mental health team that created the screening and treatment protocols,” she added. “Without that support, it would have been very difficult to have built the mental health team that has now grown into a large program of psychologists and psychiatrists that continue to support the mental health needs of our members.”
When facing the heartbreaking repercussions of the World Trade Center attack a few days later, Dr. Trujillo told The Times that he had found solace in the “cool integrity” of passengers who called their families from the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania that day. Rather than panicking, they resolved to do what they could to thwart the hijackers.
“That is very moving to me,” he said. “Families could be consoled by the heroic deed of a loved one.”