Psychiatry Advances

Kymberly Young PhD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She is an expert in brain science. Her 2017 article in the AJP, “Randomized Clinical Trial of Real-Time fMRI Amygdala Neurofeedback for Major Depressive Disorder: Effects on Symptoms and Autobiographical Memory Recall” is gaining attention. This Podcast focuses on the amygdala, how therapeutically it can be brought “online” in the brain through calibrated patient self-efforts related to their memories.

Dr. Natacha De Genna PHD is an Assistant Professor with longstanding acclaimed work relating to marijuana and nicotine use by pregnant mothers, how young age and mental health and discrimination may affect both mothers and their children post pregnancy. Her video “Mothers and Marijuana” is featured on the NIH Web Site. Like alcohol, paired maternal use of both nicotine and marijuana can be especially toxic. Her work on both large and smaller data sets has clinical implications.

Dr. Paula Marie Powe is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry/Medical Director of Theiss Early Childhood and School-Based Behavioral Center. Her work involves analysis and intervention in infants 0-3 years old exposed to stress. potentially toxic stress. This type stress impacts later mental and physical health. Poor outcomes are not inevitable. Adaptive support enhances infant and child resilience. Programmatic interventions e.g. “parent-child interaction therapy” are reviewed and highlighted.

Khaled Moussawi MD, PHD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, is an experienced clinical neurologist and neuroscientist. This Podcast summarizes his research team’s efforts to identify and translate pre-clinical neurobiological findings into actionable clinical treatment protocols for alcohol and potentially other addictions. Deep Brain Stimulation, DBS, now approved treatment of Parkinson’s disease, holds such promise for patients with chronic severe alcohol use disorders.

Rebecca Price PhD is Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her innovative integrated research on brain plasticity coupled with computer based cognitive therapy has gained much visibility in the psychiatric literature and at Pitt where she has recently received the Chancellors Distinguished Research Award. This Podcast discusses her research work and methodology as this relates to Ketamine infusion for refractory depression and TBS, Transcranial Brain Stimulation in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Sansea Jacobson, MD, is an associate psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and director, UPMC Graduate Medical Education WELL Committee. More than 1,700 residents and fellows are in training at UPMC. This podcast discusses physician wellbeing both prior to and during COVID-19, including support systems and individual challenges. Despite the difficulties, COVID-19 empowers doctors to do what they have been trained to do, thereby reinforcing positive identities.

Dr. Bruce Rollman is the UPMC Endowed Chair in General Internal Medicine and Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. This Podcast describes his highly influential two decades of research in depression and cardiovascular care, including the “Hopeful Heart Trial”, his most recent NIH-funded study that examined the impact of a “blended” collaborative care strategy for treating both heart failure and co-morbid depression.

Sarah L. Pederson PhD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry. She is a national authority on alcohol use and its more serious social/psychological problems. Her research work is remarkable for its multi-causal personal assessments, racial and otherwise, e.g. measurements of impulsivity and other personal characteristics associated with drinking both in the laboratory and in vivo in the community. This Podcast also considers the effects of Covid-19, pre and now, upon drinking.

Dr. David Brent is an Endowed Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Pitt/WPH. He is the national expert for understanding, predicting and intervening in Adolescent suicidal behavior, having researched these topics for more than thirty years and conducting relevant controlled clinical trials. This Podcast reviews results of these clinical trials, specifically the challenges of population and individual prediction, screening, machine learning, intervention and approaches for patient safety planning.

Gina Perez is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. She is Associate Chief /Behavioral Health Network and Telepsychiatry for UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital. This Podcast, 2nd in this Pandemic Series, describes the considerable expansion and implications for the future of telepsychiatry in treating psychiatric patients. Not only in out-patient settings but widely so. Post pandemic it is very likely that most of these changes will persist, thereby altering psychiatric medical care broadly.