Located in the heart of Boston, MGH is the third oldest general hospital in the United States and the largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. This 900-bed hospital offers sophisticated diagnostic and therapeutic care in virtually every specialty and subspecialty of medicine and surgery. MGH annually admits 50,000 inpatients, handles nearly 2 million outpatient visits, records 90,000 emergency room visits, and performs over 40,000 operations. MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States. MGH has an annual research budget of over $750 million. MGH has a vast array of resources as well as collaborators, and is a supportive and contributing environment in our quest for knowledge for the science behind the art and practice of medicine.

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.