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Penn State University is one of the top 20 research
universities in the country.
And the Department of Psychiatry is
part of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
and the Penn State College of Medicine.
We have programs in the clinical arena,
providing psychiatric services to central Pennsylvania region.
We have educational programs that
include residency programs, child fellowship
programs, a psychology internship program.
We teach medical students and graduate students.
We have research programs that include cutting edge research
in sleep, in mood disorders work,
in child psychiatry, child psychology, and in addiction.
The founding chair of our department
was Dr. Anthony Kales, a sleep researcher
who also founded the Sleep Research and Treatment
Center, which has become one of the leaders in the field
of sleep epidemiology, the influence
and interaction between sleep and inflammation,
and a leader in understanding the cardiovascular risk
factors from sleep disturbance.
Collaboration is key to what we do at many different levels.
We have a collaboration with Pinnacle Health
to provide care through the Pennsylvania Psychiatric
Institute.
Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute
is both an inpatient and an outpatient facility.
We have 89 inpatient beds.
The adult beds include a geriatric unit.
Frequently, many of these adults have medical comorbidities,
as well as their psychiatric reason for admission.
We have a 16-bed unit for adolescents,
and a 9-bed unit for children.
We have ECT services for both inpatients and outpatients,
and our ECT service is growing on a monthly basis.
On the outpatient side, we have [INAUDIBLE] hospital program
for children, and a similar one for adults.
In addition, we have specialized programs
for dialectical behavioral therapy for first episode
psychosis, and we also have a Hispanic clinic
for patients who prefer to get their treatment in Spanish.
With reverse integration, our goal
is to bring primary care and specialty care providers here.
This is where most of our patients
get their physical health needs met.
And so we would like to see every patient at Pennsylvania
Psychiatric Institute receiving counseling in diet,
in exercise, in weight management.
The department has recently become an associate member
of the National Network of Depression Centers.
The Network has a registry that has patient reported outcomes
on a variety of measures to do with mania, depression, trauma.
And so what we'd like to do is become
a site for both clinical research
and other kinds of research so that we
can show what are best practices for psychiatric patients,
and how to enhance those outcomes by using tools
from the National Network of Depression Centers.
Our goal is to make Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute
an academic flagship for the department,
both from a clinical perspective as well
as for education and research.
The Department of Psychiatry and the Pennsylvania Psychiatric
Institute partner with our community
to provide programs that will benefit the community
health, particularly programs in addiction and in facing
depression.
One of the unique features of our laboratory
is the use of functional near infrared spectroscopy.
This is a neuroimaging technology
that uses light to image the brain activity
in the prefrontal cortex.
It is small, it is relatively inexpensive, it's portable,
and so we can actually go out and work with it on site
to get imaging data.
One of the applications that we have
is in working with patients with either prescription opiate
dependence or alcohol dependence.
And we're working with the care and treatment centers
to develop an objective central nervous system
brain-based measure that helps us do a better job of making
clinical decisions by giving us information about how
vulnerable this person is to relapse
and whether or not they may or may not
have a chance of maintaining their absence once they leave
the residential treatment and go home.
Our preliminary data is very promising,
and we're continuing to do that work with the Caron Treatment
Centers.
We believe the best research is based on clinical experience,
and that clinical experience should inform our research.
That the two aren't separable, but they actually
should go together.
We think that research should have
a direct impact on the clinical work
that we do with kids and adolescents.
And we also believe that the best clinical work
should inform the research questions we ask.
Penn State Health is focused on trying
to help kids and adolescents who historically haven't had access
to services.
For example, Dr. Bobinsky is working with girls with ADHD,
which were traditionally ignored as a population of kids
who could have ADHD.
Drs.
Murray and Pearl and their crew are
working with young adults and adolescents
with autism who have also been ignored.
We have a division of autism services
that focuses on the transition for adolescents
to young adulthood for individuals that
have autism spectrum disorder.
We have several novel programs that
focus on this that are one of a kind in the country.
Programs such as social skills interventions, specifically
for those ages, medication management, individual therapy,
and then also some programs specifically for transition,
to help individuals define and follow
through with goals from [? movement ?] to adulthood.
As part of our collaboration actually
with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services
Bureau of Autism Services, we have a staffed call line
where people can call in with any sort of questions
that they may have for individuals
living in Pennsylvania.
We also go to events in the community.
Our collaboration with public health sciences
focuses on data through insurance claims.
And we're really interested in looking at emergency department
utilization, which is really high for adolescents
with autism spectrum disorder.
Trying to find different things that
predict emergency department utilization
that we could modify.
So things that we could change to decrease
these rates in adolescents.
So many patients and families are affected by mental illness
and affected by behavioral health problems that
really are devastating.
And as an academic department, it's
our responsibility to bring the resources of research,
the resources of an academic university
to focus on these problems, to generate the new knowledge
that we need in order to bring individualized, personalized
treatments to patients and families
that will allow them to improve the quality of life
that they're able to have.