Theodore Millon

American psychologist

Theodore Millon (/m//ɪ/'/l//ɒ//n/) (August 18, 1928 – January 29, 2014) was an American psychologist known for his work on personality disorders. He founded the Journal of Personality Disorders and was the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. In 2008 he was awarded the Gold Medal Award For Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Foundation named the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology" after him. Millon developed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, worked on the diagnostic criteria for passive aggressive personality disorder, worked on editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and developed subtypes of a variety of personality disorders.

Millon was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the only child of immigrant Jewish parents from Lithuania and Poland. His 19th century ancestors came from the town of Valozhyn, then a part of the Russian Empire. He studied psychology, physics, and philosophy as an undergraduate at the City College of New York and went on to receive his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 1954, with a dissertation on "the authoritarian personality." Millon was a member of the board of trustees of Allentown State Hospital, a large Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital for 15 years. Shortly thereafter he became the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. He was Professor Emeritus at Harvard Medical School and the University of Miami. In 2008, Millon was awarded the Gold Medal Award For Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology by the American Psychological Association. The American Psychological Foundation presents an award named after Millon, known as the "Theodore Millon Award in Personality Psychology," to honor outstanding psychologists engaged in "advancing the science of personality psychology including the areas of personology, personality theory, personality disorders, and personality measurement."

Millon has written numerous popular works on personality, developed diagnostic questionnaire tools such as the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, and contributed to the development of earlier versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Among other diagnoses, Millon advocated for an expanded version of passive aggressive personality disorder, which he termed 'negativistic' personality disorder and argued could be diagnosed by criteria such as "expresses envy and resentment toward those apparently more fortunate" and "claims to be luckless, ill starred, and jinxed in life; personal content is more a matter of whining and grumbling than of feeling forlorn and despairing" (APA, 1991, R17). Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder was expanded somewhat as an official diagnosis in the DSM III R but then relegated to the appendix of DSM IV, tentatively renamed 'Passive Aggressive (Negativistic) Personality Disorder'.