Oakland Public Schools
In 1946, soon after she moved to the Bay Area, Dr. Sarvis became a consultant in individual guidance and development for the Oakland Public Schools, a position she held until her death.
Under the influence of Dr. Sarvis, Oakland pioneered a collaborative model for school guidance. Still a relatively new phenomenon in itself, in mid-century children’s psychiatric medicine was structured towards individual casework in standalone clinics. A teacher or other school personnel member might make an initial referral for a particular student, but the student’s treatment and progress was seldom disclosed to teachers, who likewise had no opportunity to give feedback to the clinician.
In place of endless appointments working towards unclear goals, Dr. Sarvis steered the Oakland guidance counselors to identify and pursue “the next useful step” in collaboration with teachers, parents, principals, clinicians, and especially students themselves. The holistic model operated along the idea that small, measurable progress and not solutions should be the metric through which to assess guidance success. Individuals from a range of professions contributed their disciplinary and personal strengths towards taking this next useful step.
The Oakland School District presented guidance workers with additional challenges. School and neighborhood demographics varied widely throughout the district. Dr. Sarvis and her colleagues needed a framework that allowed them to work with poverty-stricken urban slums, nontraditional family structures, and immigrant parents with little to no English-language skills. They found an interactive, flexible model achieved more lasting and more measurable success for their students. Dr. Sarvis and coworker Marianne Pennekamp wrote an account of the model, Collaboration in School Guidance. Their methods were tested in courses at the Berkeley School of Social Work and other locations across the country.[
University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Sarvis became a Professor at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959.[ She taught a course on psychoanalysis in social work to second year graduate students and collaborated on publications with several other School of Social Welfare staff members, including Lydia Rapoport and Sally De Wees. Rapoport and colleague Beulah Parker praised Dr. Sarvis’ adeptness at apprehending theories from a broad range of disciplines and translating them into concrete tools for the use of social work professionals. They described her teaching and lecturing style as “unpedantic,” and many of her former students went on to fruitful careers.
Dr. Sarvis and Marianne Pennekamp authored a book about their experiences in the Oakland schools. Berkeley colleague Robert A. Wasser, a Lecturer and Field Work Consultant at the School of Social Welfare, tested the manuscript with his students to provide feedback.[
In addition to teaching in the School of Social Welfare, Dr. Sarvis also worked at Cowell Memorial Hospital on the Berkeley campus, first as a physician and later as a consultant to the psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers staffing the Student Health Services.
Private Practice
Dr. Sarvis entered private practice in 1955, locating her offices at 2811 College Ave., Berkeley.[ Tending to focus on multivariable causation, Dr. Sarvis’s diagnoses were ahead of their time, and casework from her private practice led to several groundbreaking discoveries. Dr. Sarvis was among the first to examine temporal lobe damage as one of the factor in developmental disorders, including autism and paranoid attitudes.
She added psychoanalytic services to her practice after completing analytic training with the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society in 1955 and the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1959.[
Permanente Psychiatric Clinic
Mary Sarvis helped increase accessibility to institutionalized psychiatric services. Along with psychiatrist Harvey Powelson and psychologists Mervin B. Friedman and Timothy Leary, she planned the Permanente Psychiatric Clinic, which later became a part of the Kaiser Health Plan. The clinic offered psychiatric services covered by medical insurance.
Leary, who later became famous for his experiments with psilocybin, envisioned the clinic as a sort of “psychlotron” for identifying and diagnosing elements of personality. He theorized that a controlled environment would allow clinicians to accelerate the human personality until it fractured into component parts. He used data from the clinic to develop his theory on the interpersonal dimensions of personality, published in 1956. In the Introduction, Leary thanked Dr. Sarvis for lending “her diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge to the research group with unsparing generosity.” Dr. Sarvis also appears as an authority on child personality in the text, associated with the ideas that parents can differ in their opinions of a child and that personality traits found in the grandparents can skip a generation to reappear in their grandchildren.[
Stephen Rauch, another Permanente Clinic psychologist, also collaborated with Mary Sarvis on a research study. Published posthumously in 1966, their paper continued Dr. Sarvis’ investigations into temporal lobe damage, reporting a case where damage was only discovered after considerable treatment.[
Associations
Dr. Sarvis identified with a number of professional associations and non-profit organizations.
She was a member of the American Psychological Association, American Psychoanalytic Association, the American Medical Association, and the East Bay and Northern California Psychiatric Societies.
Additionally, she partnered with several organizations involved in the mental health of children. Dr. Sarvis served as director of the Ann Martin Foundation, a non-profit first established in Oakland in 1963 using funds left by Dr. Ann Martin, founder of the Child Development Center at Children’s Hospital. The Ann Martin Foundation continues to operate to this day under the aegis of the Ann Martin Center and provides psychological and educational services to children and families. Similarly, she served as consultant for the staff of the Parent-Child Counseling Center in Orinda, founded in 1961.
At the time of her death, Dr. Sarvis was director of the Oakland Youth Employment Project. Previously, she served on the city’s Mayor’s Committee for Civic Unity. In addition to the aforementioned Ann Martin Foundation, Dr. Sarvis’ obituary requested that memorial contributions go to the American Civil Liberties Union or the American Friends Service Committee, suggesting her membership in those organizations. According to her sister Betty Luse, Dr. Sarvis enjoyed hiking with the Sierra Club.