
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)
The MGH Department of Psychiatry has more than 50 specialty clinical and research programs that address virtually every aspect of psychiatric disorders including depression, schizophrenia, and a host of other disorders such as anxiety, panic, attention deficit, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, and post-traumatic stress. All are complex, painful, often debilitating conditions that alter the perceptions, feelings and behaviors of those who suffer. “Psychiatry is a field of brain study and repair,” notes Jerrold F. Rosenbaum, MD, the department’s seventh and current chief of Psychiatry. “In decades past, the mind and body, or should I say mind and brain, were seen as different and distinct. Modern psychiatry sees them as one. Our organ of interest in psychiatry is the brain, and what a marvelously and infinitely complex one it is.”
The Department of Psychiatry offers an exceptional depth and breadth of patient services including: emergency and urgent care; general and specialty outpatient care for adults, children and adolescents; a 24-bed inpatient unit; psychological and educational assessment services; dedicated psychiatry services for both medical and surgical inpatients and outpatients; an addictions program; a neurotherapeutics service, and forensic psychiatry services. The department’s more than 600 affiliated psychiatrists and psychologists are uniquely trained as clinicians, researchers and teachers, and include some of the field’s most accomplished and recognized specialists, particularly in psychopharmacology, cognitive-behavioral therapy and behavioral medicine. They are able to achieve extraordinary treatment results because of the research that underlies their expert care, and the patient concerns that drive the research questions they study.
The integration of patient care and clinical research has been a hallmark of the Department of Psychiatry for more than 30 years. The department’s clinical research programs began with small scale studies by psychiatrists and psychologists seeking to provide new treatment options for their patients. Today, the department has the largest clinical research program in the hospital, with studies at the forefront of neuroscience, molecular biology, and genetics. Thanks to tools such as neuroimaging, genetics and genomics, Department of Psychiatry researchers are beginning to map the pathways through which brain biology interacts with life circumstances and events to produce psychiatric illnesses. This research is making it possible to pinpoint affected areas of the brain; understand inherited risk factors and the role of environmental stress; develop more effective psychotherapies, medications, and neurotherapeutic treatments; and ultimately to prevent these illnesses from occurring by intervening early.
At MGH Psychiatry, we are uniquely poised to do battle with some of the most common and debilitating of all disease conditions because of the scope, excellence and diversity of our clinical and research teams. Jerrold F. Rosenbaum, MD, the department’s seventh and current chief of Psychiatry
