The past 10 years have seen rapid acceleration of our understanding of how genes and environment act and interact in influencing risk for eating disorders. The Eating Disorders Genetics Initiative (EDGI) is currently rolling out across the globe. But how do we integrate this emerging scientific information into our understanding of how some people are more vulnerable to developing eating disorders than others? How can clinicians incorporate information about genetics into their case conceptualizations and clinical work? Where is this research leading us? This presentation will distill the current state of the science and address these critical questions.

This presentation will describe recent research showing how neurodevelopmental problems and childhood maltreatment contribute towards increasing risk of severe mental illness and will discuss the likely physiological underpinnings of this additive risk and the clinical implications.  

While much of the research points to postpartum psychiatric conditions being quite similar to other psychiatric conditions, except that they occur in the postpartum period, clinicians who study   psychopathology among pregnant and postpartum mothers find that they can be quite unique.  The experience of motherhood is influenced often by past trauma, ongoing partner relationships and cultural meanings of being pregnant or postpartum. The talk will discuss case studies from the Mother Baby unit in India and explore contemporary research in this area. The role of trauma in perinatal psychiatric disorders and how maternal trauma may contribute to attributions of psychopathological states to the fetus or the infant, to dissociative states and to suicidality will also be discussed.  In South Asian cultures, trauma often relates to patriarchal norms and gender preference and influences help seeking.  The talk will also discuss the use of a clinical interview used cross culturally- the Stafford Interview for Maternal Mental Health in order to precisely document psychopathology in different cultures. 

Until the discovery of the antidepressant effects of ketamine, all of the medications used to treat depression were variations of treatments discovered in the late 1950s. Although they help many people, these medications have many limitations that are well known to people who have struggled with depression. To get new types of antidepressants, we had to think differently about the brain and the biology of depression. This presentation will highlight the change in perspective that led us to discover the rapid and robust antidepressant effects of ketamine in depressed patients. I will then briefly describe what the field of depression research is learning about ketamine and esketamine (Spravato) that led to the FDA approval of Spravato in March, 2019. Lastly, I will show how the crosstalk between basic and clinical neuroscience has led to the hypothesis that ketamine and Spravato may work by helping the brain regrow synaptic connections between nerve cells that were lost due to the impact of stress and depression on the brain. These new connections appear to enable circuits regulating mood to function more effectively. Ultimately, this is a story about hope. It highlights that there are opportunities for fundamental discovery that cannot be anticipated and that can profoundly change the lives of people with depression and other illnesses.