Abstract: Psychiatrist and pioneer in global mental health. Born on Sept 19, 1920, in Tainan, Taiwan, he died on July 20, 2010, in Vancouver, Canada, aged 89 years. When Tsung-yi Lin began his career, psychiatry was an inward-looking discipline that focused almost exclusively on western countries. He helped change that. Lin's pioneering vision, charisma, and diplomacy played a pivotal part in setting the discipline on course towards the global perspective it has today. “In a sense, he was global psychiatry before there was a global psychiatry”, said Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at Harvard University. “He had a global perspective far in advance of just about everybody.” Born into a prominent academic family at a time when Taiwan was a province of Japan, Lin received his medical training at the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University School of Medicine, graduating in 1943. Soon after the end of World War II, and with Taiwan now ceded to the Republic of China, he was appointed to be the founding chairman of the National Taiwan University's Department of Psychiatry. Lin's father, Mo-seng Lin, was a prominent academic who had been arrested and presumably executed soon after the infamous “2/28 incident” in 1947, in which Nationalist troops fired on native Taiwanese protesters. Yet despite his father's death and at a time of great political tension, Lin was able to build the foundations of Taiwan's modern mental health system. “He recruited and trained practically all the psychiatric leaders who are themselves excellent clinicians, teachers, and researchers in their own right”, said Keh-Ming Lin, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Together, they shaped the mental health care system that has continued to develop and evolve and is probably one of the best in the world.” Under Lin's leadership, mental health programmes based in schools and communities were initiated in Taiwan during the 1950s, well in advance of most other countries. His groundbreaking work continued in 1953, when he published a study on the epidemiology of mental disorders in Taiwan—a study often cited as the starting point of the modern era of psychiatric epidemiology. A decade later, as director of the division of mental health at WHO, Lin was also a major architect of a much larger project, the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia. “Epidemiological data was extremely important…but it was an extraordinarily difficult time to focus on this. This was the era that psychiatry was really dominated by psychoanalysis. It had little interest in science. Tsung-Yi's work was really meant to improve the scientific basis of psychiatry”, said Kleinman. During his years at WHO, from 1964 to 1969, Lin oversaw the beginning of many other projects that established the agenda for epidemiology in psychiatry. Later, as a consultant to WHO, he helped other countries shape their mental health services. For decades, Lin was an effective advocate for psychiatry as a centrepiece of public health. “He often said there is no health without mental health”, said Keh-ming Lin. As president, and later honorary president, of the World Federation for Mental Health he was instrumental in helping promote mental health at the community level, worldwide. Lin left Taiwan in 1964 and did not return for more than two decades, during which time he lived and worked in North America, first at the University of Michigan, and then at the University of British Columbia, retiring from his full-time position in 1985. In 1986, after a long absence, he returned to Taiwan and became deeply involved in the reconciliation movement between the Taiwanese Government and the people. His contribution to this movement and to the integration of different ethnic groups in Taiwan earned him the first Presidential Culture Award in 2001. “My own feeling is that somewhere along in his career he realised that he should have been a politician”, said Kleinman. “He was deeply committed to Taiwan politically, and in a very positive way.” Lin modelled his life on the principle of “never give up”, remembers his daughter Elizabeth Lin, a clinical professor in the USA at the University of Washington Medical School's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences. Lin is survived by his wife of 65 years, Mei-chen, their five children, eleven grandchildren, and one great grandson.