Irvin S. Schonfeld

Irvin Sam Schonfeld
Born
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Alma materCUNY Graduate Center
Brooklyn College
The New School for Social Research
Scientific career
FieldsPsychology
InstitutionsCity College

Irvin Sam Schonfeld is an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the City College of the City University of New York (CCNY).[1] He also served on the doctoral faculty of the Educational Psychology and Psychology programs at the CUNY Graduate Center and held an appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the CUNY School of Public Health.[2] Known for his contributions to occupational health psychology,[3] he has re-examined the construct of burnout and co-developed widely used psychometric instruments for job-related mental health assessment.[4]

He is the recipient of Society for Occupational Health Psychology service award.[5]

Biography

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Schonfeld spent his childhood in the Glenwood Houses, a housing project in the Flatlands section of the borough.[2] His father, George Schonfeld, was a World War II veteran and his mother Ruth (née Berson) Schonfeld, worked part-time in a department store.[6] Schonfeld is related to the writer Dayal Kaur Khalsa (née Marcia Schonfeld) and the expert and dealer in Impressionist paintings, Sam Salz.[7] Schonfeld earned a B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Mathematics from Brooklyn College, and an M.A. in Psychology from The New School for Social Research, which he completed while teaching mathematics in the New York City public schools.[8]

As a student, he was active in anti–Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movements and contributed as a writer for the underground campus newspaper Nova Vanguard.[6] His activism drew the attention of the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Internal Security, which subpoenaed his college records.[2] A letter he had written to The New York Times Magazine was later included in George Kennan’s Democracy and the Student Left.[9]

He then earned his Ph.D. in developmental and educational psychology from the CUNY Graduate Center and completed postdoctoral training in epidemiology at Columbia University’s School of Public Health.[6]

Academic career

Schonfeld began his academic career in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia where  he served as a Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1981 to 2010 and briefly as a Research Associate at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.[2] He became an assistant professor in the School of Education at The City College of New York (CCNY), advancing to full professor in 1994.[10]

He subsequently held multiple appointments, including professor in the Department of Psychology at CCNY (2008–2021), Professor of Educational Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center (1998–2021), Professor of Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center (2002–2021), and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the CUNY School of Public Health (2017–2021).[11] He is currently a professor emeritus at CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center.[1]

A pivotal phase of Schonfeld’s formation was his post-doctoral fellowship in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program at Columbia University’s School of Public Health (1983–1985), where he was mentored by Bruce P. Dohrenwend; that training catalyzed his shift away from developmental psychology toward research on work, stress, and mental health.[7] In 2006, he founded the Newsletter of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology (serving until 2010)[12] and served on the editorial board of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.[8]

Research

Schonfeld is known for his contributions to occupational health psychology, with research spanning several decades and addressing the intersection of work and mental health. His early scholarship examined the psychological impact of job stress on teachers, helping to shape understanding of how job demands affect psychological well-being.[13]

With Joseph Mazzola (Meredith College), Schonfeld wrote about the strengths and limitations of qualitative research.[14] In addition, he and Mazzola used qualitative methods to study job stress in the self-employed.[15] With Renzo Bianchi (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Schonfeld produced empirical evidence revealing that what has been called burnout is actually a depressive phenomenon.[16]

In 2020, he and Bianchi co-developed the Occupational Depression Inventory (ODI), a nine-item assessment tool that measures depressive symptoms explicitly attributed to work.[17] The ODI has demonstrated strong psychometric properties, including high validity and measurement invariance across multiple languages and cultural contexts, making it a widely applicable instrument for occupational mental health research.[18]

Building on their work on depression, Bianchi and Schonfeld expanded into the assessment of work-related anxiety, contributing to the development of the Occupational Anxiety Inventory (OCAI) and the Pandemic Anxiety Inventory (PAI). These tools have been validated in collaboration with international research teams, further extending the scope of his contributions to understanding and measuring the mental health impacts of work and global crises.[19]

Selected publications

References

  1. ^ a b Rosales, Ariadne (2025-07-23). "Rethinking Burnout: Dr. Irvin Schonfeld's Breaking Point Challenges Conventional Wisdom". Colin Powell School. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  2. ^ a b c d Peterson, Audrey (2025-07-10). "Behind Burnout". Brooklyn College. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  3. ^ "6 Ways You're Coping With a Roller-Coaster Market (Published 2022)". 2022-07-29. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  4. ^ Zagorski, Nick (2021). "New Instrument Developed to Assess Workplace Depression". Psychiatric News. 56 (3) appi.pn.2021.1.41. doi:10.1176/appi.pn.2021.1.41. ISSN 0033-2704.
  5. ^ Rose, Maya (2021-11-04). "Professor Irvin Sam Schonfeld honored with the 2021 Society of Occupational Health Psychology Service Award". Educational Psychology CUNY Hub. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  6. ^ a b c "Professor Schonfeld on Being a Brownsville Native, Becoming a Teacher and Researcher of Work-Related Stress, and Building Life-Long Relationships". The City College of New York. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  7. ^ a b York, The City College of New (2021-08-11). "Irvin Schonfeld". The City College of New York. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  8. ^ a b "Acknowledgments From Irvin Sam Schonfeld | Springer Publishing". connect.springerpub.com. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  9. ^ https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/Schonfeld,%201968,%20Kennan%20book.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOorUqmDzChSLgK1nXR1Eeo6LmwhSJjGFBOtN8gIAi6RHO7WAOUMq DEMOCRACY and the STUDENT LEFT BARNARD CORNELL by GEORGE F. KENNAN and Students and Teachers from:
  10. ^ Schonfeld, Irvin (1989-01-01). "Psychology and City College". Publications and Research.
  11. ^ "Professor Confronts the Real Cost of Job Stress". www.gc.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2025-09-16.
  12. ^ Schonfeld, Irvin (2017-01-01). "How the SOHP Newsletter got started and got going". Publications and Research.
  13. ^ Schonfeld, I. S. (2001). "Stress in 1st-year women teachers: the context of social support and coping". Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs. 127 (2): 133–168. ISSN 8756-7547. PMID 11471976.
  14. ^ "Strengths and Limitations of Qualitative Approaches to Research in Occupational Health Psychology", Research Methods in Occupational Health Psychology, Routledge, pp. 292–313, 2012-11-12, doi:10.4324/9780203095249-27 (inactive 19 September 2025), ISBN 978-0-203-09524-9, retrieved 2025-09-16{{citation}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of September 2025 (link) CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  15. ^ Schonfeld, Irvin Sam; Mazzola, Joseph J. (2015). "A qualitative study of stress in individuals self-employed in solo businesses". Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. 20 (4): 501–513. doi:10.1037/a0038804. ISSN 1939-1307.
  16. ^ Schonfeld, Irvin Sam; Bianchi, Renzo (2025-05-20). Breaking point: Job stress, occupational depression, and the myth of burnout. Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781394249626. ISBN 978-1-394-24949-7.
  17. ^ Bianchi, Renzo; Schonfeld, Irvin Sam (2020). "The Occupational Depression Inventory: A new tool for clinicians and epidemiologists". Journal of Psychosomatic Research. 138 110249. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2020.110249. ISSN 0022-3999. PMID 32977198.
  18. ^ Schonfeld, Irvin Sam; Bianchi, Renzo (2022). "Distress in the workplace: Characterizing the relationship of burnout measures to the Occupational Depression Inventory". International Journal of Stress Management. 29 (3): 253–259. doi:10.1037/str0000261. ISSN 1573-3424.
  19. ^ Schonfeld, Irvin Sam; Prytherch, Tasmyn; Cropley, Mark; Bianchi, Renzo (2023). "The Pandemic Anxiety Inventory: A validation study". Journal of Health Psychology. 28 (3): 216–229. doi:10.1177/13591053221106129. ISSN 1359-1053. PMC 9982399. PMID 35787177.
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