In Memory of Andras Perenyi

            Andras Perenyi, a member of the INHN network, passed away in August 2016. I met Andras for the first time in London, England, in the year 2000, at a Congress of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology. By that time, he moved from his native Hungary to Melbourne, Australia, and in the years that followed we kept in contact and became friends.

            In Melbourne, Andras worked in the public system with a private practice and I understood that he participated in clinical trials with psychotropic drugs. We did not collaborate in any research, but attended many meetings together. 

            Andras always had a distinguished sense of humour that did not leave him even at the time he was seriously ill. Just about three months before he passed away, at a time when he already knew that his days were numbered, he still told me on the phone that once more he would prove the doctors wrong.

            Andras was a gentle, kind person that loved to have friends enjoying his home and sharing part of his family life. Ana, my wife, and I had several opportunities to be seated at his table with his family and other friends. After I moved back to São Paulo in July 2013, I had to return to Melbourne for a week to solve some business. It was mid-December. Andras kindly insisted I should stay at his home. It was a time when I could celebrate charming and warm nights with his friends and family. 

            Being through the hard time of the communist domination in Hungary made him a man of steel and his natural courage created the condition to make himself a respectful doctor in a different country, although never being fully able to lose his nostalgic feelings for his homeland: the proud Hungarian man remained untouched.

            We have lost a true friend before his time and before at least I imagined it could happen. But we don’t choose such moments and this day will come to all of us. In Andras’ case, the comfort we have is that although some years short, he did fill his life with intensity of a passion. Andras considered himself an accomplished person, and surely for most of the people that crossed the large road of his life and mainly the ones that most needed him, he will remain in that special corner of the heart dedicated to memory

Carlos R. Hojaij

December 29, 2016