He was the founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at University of California Irvine College of Medicine.
He gained national prominence by announcing in 1987 that Ronald Reagan had been suffering from diminished mental ability as early as 1980. He came to this conclusion by using the Gottschalk-Gleser scales, an internationally used diagnostic tool he helped develop for charting impairments in brain function, to measure speech patterns in Reagan's 1980 and 1984 presidential debates.[1]
Gottschalk coinvented software that uncovered a link between childhood attention deficit disorder and adult addiction to alcohol and drugs. In 2004, at age 87, he published his last book, World War II: Neuropsychiatric Casualties, Out of Sight, Out of Mind.
In 2006, his son filed a suit alleging that Gottschalk had lost millions of dollars in an advance-fee scam.[2]
Gottschalk died at his home on November 27, 2008.[3]
Selected publications
Books
Louis A. Gottschalk and Goldine C. Gleser (1969), Measurement of Psychological States Through the Content Analysis of Verbal Behaviour, Univ. of California Press, ISBN978-0-520-01482-4
Gottschalk, Louis A. (1979), The Content analysis of verbal behavior: further studies, SP Medical Scientific Books, ISBN978-0-89335-047-5
Gottschalk, Louis A. (1984), How to understand and analyze your own dreams, Corona Del Mar, Calif.: Art Reproductions Press, ISBN978-0-939373-00-0
Gottschalk, Louis A. (1985), The tree of knowledge, Corona del Mar, Calif.: Eden Press, ISBN978-0-533-01652-5
Gottschalk, Louis A. (1989), How to do self-analysis and other self-psychotherapies, Northvale, N.J.: J. Aronson, ISBN978-0-87668-847-2
Gottschalk, L.A. (1976), "Children's speech as a source of data toward the measurement of psychological states", Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 5 (1): 11–36, doi:10.1007/BF01537082, PMID24407969, S2CID46172594
Gottschalk, L.A.; Bechtel, R. (1995), "Computerized measurement of the content analysis of natural language for use in biomedical and …", Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 47 (2): 123–130, doi:10.1016/0169-2607(95)01645-A, PMID7587159