Antoni Ignacy Tadeusz Kępiński (16 November 1918 – 8 June 1972) was a Polish psychiatrist and philosopher. In his youth he was influenced by Carl Jung's approach. He is known as the originator of concepts of information metabolism (IM) and axiological psychiatry.
Kępiński was born in Dolina, which at that time was part of Poland (now southwestern Ukraine). During the childhood years, he resided in Nowy Sącz where his father held the position of starosta. He attended the élite Bartłomiej Nowodworski High School in Kraków. In 1936, Kępiński entered the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University. In 1939, he interrupted his studies before graduation and volunteered for the Polish Army to defend his country from the impending Invasion of Poland. After the simultaneous Invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Kępiński was captured and imprisoned in Hungary, to where he had fled. In 1940, he managed to escape imprisonment and headed to France, then Spain, where he was imprisoned in Miranda del Ebro.
Later he was freed and moved to the United Kingdom, spending a short time with the Polish Air Force in Great Britain. In 1944-5, he continued his medical studies at University of Edinburgh's Polish School of Medicine, graduating in 1946. He then returned to Poland and took up psychiatry at the Psychiatric Clinic in the Collegium Medicum of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Shortly before his death in 1972 he was appointed professor in the faculty.
As a concentration camp inmate himself, Kępiński took part in a rehabilitation programme for survivors from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Due to his involvement, in the 1950s, in the rehabilitation programme for former concentration camp inmates, Kępiński may be regarded as the pioneer of the PTSD research. The idea of such research originated in the mind of Kępiński's colleague Stanisław Kłodziński. Together with fellow researchers from the Psychiatric Clinic of the Medical Academy in Cracow they examined large number of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors and mapped out the clinical picture of the concentration camp syndrome which they called the KZ-Syndrome.