2021 ANNUAL REPORT

Precision mental health is integral to precision health.

With our experiences during the pandemic and with ongoing challenges across the world, we are more aware today than ever before of just how precious our mental wellbeing is.

As a leader in academic medicine, I feel so fortunate to have a sense of the extraordinary progress across the biomedical sciences and within psychiatry specifically. It’s wonderful to see and support the translation of scientific discovery to clinical care, allowing prevention and treatments that restore good lives for people and families, and at scale create better lives for all within communities and populations. Together with our patients, scientists, clinicians, trainees and staff, we at Stanford are creating a new paradigm for modern psychiatry. The Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness is a key to this new paradigm. Stanford's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences is the nation’s epicenter for precision psychiatry.

The Center’s advances are made possible through a truly collaborative approach, bringing more precise diagnoses and treatments based on neuroscience discoveries to help people, families, communities, populations and to help future generations. Major mental health disorders are very common, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide, they hit early, they hit hard, and unrecognized and untreated they can change the trajectory of a lifetime and of generations. Though treatment is remarkably effective in improving quality of life and reducing the burden of symptoms and impairments, finding the right treatment is too often a process of months or years. Moreover, mental disorders may complicate and worsen the risks associated with other health conditions. For example, depression increases the risk of cardiovascular-related deaths threefold.

Mitigating such mental health consequences requires the best cutting-edge prediction, prevention and preemption strategies that translational neuroscience can provide. Harnessing advances in the fields of biomedical sciences, medicine, engineering, education, social sciences, and ethics will be key in revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness with greater precision, personalized care and precision health.

In this past year, it has been my great pleasure to announce the launch, here at Stanford, of a First-in-world Translational Precision Mental Health Clinic. This exciting new clinic will make scientific breakthroughs in precision psychiatry available to our patients. Because of its pioneering new approaches, the Center is leading the way for precision psychiatry within our field. Other centers at other institutions are already seeking to model their approach on the approach we have here at the Stanford Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. In these many ways, the Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness is a shining example of how our department has become a platform from which to branch out and serve our campus, our community, and our world.

We welcome your engagement and ongoing partnership as we realize the biomedical revolution for modern precision psychiatry.

Laura Roberts, M.D.

Chairman, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor

Editor-in-Chief, Books, American Psychiatric Association

Editor-in-Chief, Academic Medicine