About Us

Department Chair Welcome

Our mission in the Department of Psychiatry is centered on providing outstanding care to patients and families; educating future generations of mental health professionals; creating new knowledge; and fostering productive collaborations in our region and beyond. In addition to caring for individuals in distress, we are challenged to meet the needs of communities–promoting health and mental health amongst diverse regional, national, and international populations. Our founding traditions, which value education and the integration of mental health services into all of medicine, continue to be fundamental and are complimented by dynamic research and innovative partnerships.

Patient care is comprised of a wide variety of ambulatory and inpatient services and programs. Our exceptional clinicians work with persons of all ages who suffer severe mental disorders, and collaborate with colleagues to promote the wellbeing of persons in primary care, specialty settings, and in the broader workforce. For many years we have sought to ‘take down the walls’ of the Department to work with community partners in an integrated fashion and to assure access to care for those who have limited financial resources.

Drs. John Romano and George Engel forged the foundation of the Department’s outstanding education and training traditions. Today, we strive for continued innovation, exploring new approaches for training future experts and promoting the use of new skills in the 21^st century. We commit tremendous energy and resources to the support of faculty development and mentoring – recognizing that these next generations are key investments in the future of the clinic, the classroom, and our research.

The Department has developed an outstanding tradition of community partnered research, emphasizing the creative interaction of molecular, intervention, and prevention sciences. The faculty are deeply involved in studies that bring together diverse yet carefully chosen research themes: development and aging; response to stressful life events; serious psychopathology and degenerative diseases; violence and suicide; and therapeutics and prevention. We are committed to using new tools and exploring new settings, such as social media, to learn more about community populations and their needs.

I invite you to take a moment to explore our department web pages and learn more about our services, research, and training programs, and the many devoted faculty and staff who share the responsibility of overseeing these efforts. This is a time of great vitality within our Department as we combine the best of past traditions with new traditions for a new century. The Department is a national leader in public health and preventive psychiatry, recognizing that our best programs will be those that reduce the burdens of mental disorders for patients and families, and promote mental health across our communities.

Eric D. Caine, M.D.
Department Chair and John Romano Professor of Psychiatry