Vince D'Andrea's daughter Claudia remembers an afternoon when her father came home saying he’d had an “interesting” day. A student, apparently on drugs, had come to Stanford’s longtime staff psychiatrist convinced he was stuck to the ceiling. D’Andrea was unfazed. “He went up there with him,” says Claudia, ’88, “and asked about the view.”
D’Andrea had a gift for seeing things from different perspectives. From his psychiatric work in the Peace Corps to his founding of the Bridge, a prototypical peer-counseling center run by Stanford students, he offered young people gentle support. “Vince was incredibly warm and fatherly,” says former student Peter Salovey, ’80, MA ’80, who wrote the book Peer Counseling (1983, revised 1997) with him and is now chief of psychiatry at Yale. “He was a wonderful mentor with whom you could talk about anything.”
D’Andrea died of lung cancer on June 20 in his Atherton home. He was 70.
The son of Italian immigrants, he was born and raised in Philadelphia. He dreamed of becoming a novelist (and later published poetry) but followed his father’s wishes, earning an MD at Temple University and completing his psychiatry residency at Stanford. For five years, he served as the Peace Corps’ chief psychiatrist, preparing groups of volunteers for the culture shock they would encounter abroad. He returned to Stanford in 1967 as a partner in the Palo Alto Medical Clinic, which provided campus health services at the time.
“It suited him perfectly,” remembers Shirley D’Andrea, his wife of 43 years. “He had all this experience with young people, and he just loved working with students.” In addition to counseling students, he became an affiliate of the psychology department and a clinical professor of psychiatry.
In 1971, D’Andrea launched the Bridge. At a time when drugs permeated U.S. campuses and “students were not trusting of those over 30,” says Shirley, he encouraged students to help each other. “He was very interested in empowering people, in students building a strong community among themselves,” she recalls. “He never told them what to do.”
The drop-in center, operated until recently under D’Andrea’s continuous guidance, is unusual in that it’s run on a 24-hour, confidential basis by a core group of specially trained students who live there, along with others who come in to cover day shifts. An early model for similar centers on other campuses, virtually all of which have since been dropped, the Bridge stands today as “the first 24-hour peer-counseling center in the country and probably the last,” says Tai Lockspeiser, ’01, a former peer counselor. D’Andrea “very clearly made the Bridge his life at Stanford,” she adds. Lockspeiser is compiling a book of student recollections about the center, in which one contributor comments: “My favorite memories include Vince’s chuckle and the smell of his pipe on his waistcoat when you hugged him.”
D’Andrea is survived by his wife; two daughters, Daria Gantley and Claudia; two sons, Stephen and Christopher; five grandchildren; his sister, Consiglia; and his brother, Joseph.
