Events
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Speaker Series
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Speaker Series
Experiential Science Talks
Experiential Science Talks
Special Seminars
Special Seminars
Upcoming
Guest Speaker
Date
Talk Title
Location & Time
Institution
Series
Manpreet K. Singh, MD, MS
Dec 14, 2023
The lifespan of bipolar disorder: From treatment naive to treatment resistant
Bowerman Room & Virtual
11am-12pm ET
Stanford University, USA
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Singh is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Pediatric Mood Disorders Program and the Pediatric Emotion And Resilience Lab (PEARL). Her research focuses on investigating the origins and pathways for developing major mood disorders during childhood. She is also interested in processes that protect and preserve function after symptom onset. Taking a translational medicine approach, Dr. Singh’s patient-oriented research focuses on meeting patient unmet needs through research that aims to accelerate understanding of and treatment in individuals with or at high risk for lifelong mood disorders. She applies cutting edge research strategies to optimize existing therapeutic targets through innovations in trial design, investigations of placebo response, and pursuit of novel therapeutic targets through reverse and forward translation, fast-fail clinical trials, and direct modulation of key brain regions using transcranial magnetic stimulation and real-time neurofeedback. She is also investigating the comparative effectiveness and safety of existing pharmacotherapies and psychotherapies for youth with and at risk for major mood disorders, such as antidepressants, family focused psychotherapy, and mindfulness meditation to reduce mood symptoms and family stress.
Past events
Guest Speaker
Date
Talk Title
Location & Time
Institution
Series
Martin Gignac, MD, FRCP(C)
Nov 23, 2023
Comorbidities in ADHD: conduct and oppositional defiance among youth
Virtual
11am-12pm ET
McGill University
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Martin Gignac is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Forensic Psychiatrist. He obtained his medical degree from McGill University in 1998 and completed his training in psychiatry at the Université de Montréal in 2003. He completed a fellowship in pediatric psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital, an affiliate of Boston’s Harvard Medical School in the United States in 2003-2005. He has since been working as child and adolescent psychiatrist in the field of severe dysruptive disorders (ADHD, ODD, CD, SUD) at the Intitut Philippe-Pinel in Montreal. He was appointed as the Head of the child and adolescent psychiatry division of the Psychiatry Department at McGill University and the chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the McGill University Health Center, Montreal Child Hospital between 2019-2023. In addition, he is the Chair of the CADDRA Board since 2019. He he has has been speaking at national and international conference, involved in several studies and published articles and book chapters in the field of pediatric psychopharmacology.
Kelly L. Klump, PhD
Oct 26, 2023
Critical roles for puberty and ovarian hormones in the development of eating disorders: Evidence from human and animal models
Bowerman Room & Virtual
11am-12pm ET
Michigan State University, USA
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Kelly L. Klump is an MSU Foundation Endowed Professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on genetic and biological risk factors for eating disorders using both human and animal models. Dr. Klump has published over 285 papers and has received a number of NIH grants to support her work. She has been honored with several awards including the David Shakow Award for Early Career Contributions to Clinical Psychology from the American Psychological Association and the Leadership Award in Research from the Academy for Eating Disorders. Dr. Klump was the 2007-2008 President of the Academy for Eating Disorders, the largest international professional organization dedicated to the treatment, research, and prevention of eating disorders.
Charles-Albert Morin
Oct 19, 2023
Hope in psychiatry: from the elusive to the tangible*
Bowerman Room, Dobell Pavilion & Virtual
12-1pm ET
Montreal West Island IUHSSC and Douglas Research Centre
Experiential Science Talks
Charles-Albert completed undergraduate studies in political science at the Université de Montréal. As an activist, he actively works to speak out about mental illness. As a patient partner and peer helper, he uses his experience to improve care and help people living with mental health issues.
Charles-Albert is a member of the scientific committee for the 2022-2026 inter-ministerial action plan on mental health and has testified before parliamentary committee about medical aid in dying.
Seminar description: In peer helping circles, hope is often said to be a recovery tool that peer helpers must use to improve patients’ well-being. However, the literature indicates that there are ways of using this powerful tool that are more effective than others if hope is considered as an object of study.
Having experienced many difficulties with a hope that fluctuated at times, in this presentation, Charles-Albert will explore avenues of reflection concerning the use of hope as a therapeutic tool. He will also outline the opportunities for interdisciplinary research on hope that lie ahead.
*The seminar was held in French.
Cheryl Corcoran, MD
Sep 28, 2023
Computational analysis of language and face expression across stages of schizophrenia
Douglas Hall Amphitheatre & Virtual
11am-12pm ET
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, USA
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Cheryl Corcoran is Associate Professor and Program Leader in Psychosis Risk at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research focus has been on clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis, including quantification of behaviour.
Outi Linnaranta, MD, PhD
Sep 07, 2023
Clinical correlates of circadian rhythm in bipolar disorder
Bowerman Room, Dobell Pavilion & Virtual
1-2pm ET
Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
Special Seminar
Outi Linnaranta, MD, PhD, is a Clinical Psychiatrist and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry. She has worked in detecting phenotypes that would be clinically useful predictors of outcome in severe mental illness, be that symptom profiles, biomarkers, culturally sensitive tools, or objective psychophysiological monitoring. Over the past three years, she has coordinated implementation of the Finnish Mental Health Strategy as the Medical Director.
In this presentation, she will summarize main results from her work at Douglas Institute, done in collaboration with Dr. Florian Storch, Dr. Serge Beaulieu and Dr. Howard Steiger. After developing dimensional measures to describe regularity of sleep and eating rhythms, they showed an association between dysregulated sleep and eating in both bipolar disorders and eating disorders. Further correlates of dysregulated rhythms were mood and suicidal ideation.
Iris Sommer, MD PhD
June 22, 2023
Optimal treatment for women with psychosis
Virtual
11am-12pm ET
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Iris Sommer studied medicine in Amsterdam and Public Health in Maastricht. She obtained her PhD cum laude at University Utrecht in 2004 on brain imaging in schizophrenia. In 2011, Sommer was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at the University Medical Centre Utrecht, where she initiated the Voices Clinic. Since 2016, she is visting professor at the Norwegian Center of Excellence, university of Bergen, department of medical and biological psychology. Currently, she is professor of cognitive aspects of neurological and psychiatric disorders at the Departments of Neuroscience in UMCG. She received a Veni, Clinical Fellowship, Vidi and TOP grant from ZonMW and recently a large grant to study effects of antipsychotic maintenance treatment in early psychosis.
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Margaret Hahn, PhD
May 25, 2023
Schizophrenia spectrum disorders: Treating the brain, and minding the body
Douglas Hall Amphitheatre & Virtual
11am-12pm ET
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, University of Toronto, Canada
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
Dr. Margaret (Maggie) Hahn is a clinician-scientist at the CAMH (Schizophrenia Division), whose research interests lie in translational work focused on the complex interplay schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSDs), and cardiometabolic comorbidities. She currently leads several clinical trials examining novel intervention strategies for metabolic comorbidity. Dr. Hahn’s work also focuses on elucidating mechanisms underlying the intrinsic metabolic risk observed in first episode psychosis, and whether disruptions in brain bioenergetic pathways could explain the ‘premorbid’ metabolic phenotype in a subset of individuals with SSDs. She likewise oversees a basic science laboratory which conducts cutting edge research examining brain-mediated mechanisms underlying the high rates of obesity and diabetes in psychosis. From a clinical standpoint, Dr. Hahn is actively engaged to translate research knowledge into patient care, including contribution to national clinical practice guidelines. At CAMH, she leads the Mental Health and Metabolic Clinic, one of the world’s first clinics to simultaneously address mental and physical health.
Rudolf Uher, MD PhD
April 20, 2023
Early identification of risk for major mood and psychotic disorders in youth
Douglas Hall Amphitheatre & Virtual
11am-1pm ET
Dalhousie University, Canada
Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Series
This inaugural guest seminar in the Perspectives in Youth Mental Health Speaker series was preceded by introductory remarks from the Director of the Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, Dr. Lena Palaniyappan, and special felicitations of Dr. Ashok Malla, an authority in the field of Youth Mental Health.
Major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and psychosis typically have an onset in late adolescence or early adulthood and continue affecting an individual’s life for decades. Effective prevention of these disorders may depend on how well and how early we can identify individuals at risk. In this talk, Dr. Uher will explore how accurately and how long before onset we can predict who will develop one of these disorders. He will examine family history, molecular genetic information, and early manifestations of psychopathology as potential early indicators of risk in a cohort of children and youth.
Hashwin Ganesh
April 04, 2023
Systemic inflammation in psychotic illnesses: a case of chicken-and-egg
Virtual
1-2pm ET
Caprich International Inc., Canada
Experiential Science Talks
This was the inaugural talk in a series inviting people to talk about their first-hand experience with mental illness. These talks are meant to provide an alternate perspective to diagnosis and treatment and allow for the open discussion on possible future research directions, different approaches to mental illness as well as on the improvement of current psychological practices.
For our first talk of this series, we invited Hashwin Ganesh, a trained neuroscientist now working in business, to speak about his experience with psychosis. Before his diagnosis, Hashwin remembers having significant sleeping problems, irritability, and stomach issues, all of which impacted his daily life. After undergoing several tests and scans, he found himself to be on several treatment plans, each targeting one symptom at a time, none of which improved his quality of life.
Frustrated, Hashwin took his health into his own hands, and started to look at all of his test results on his own to try and make sense of his condition. He noticed a consistent pattern of inflammation behind his physical symptoms and started researching the link between inflammation and psychosis. This is where the question of the chicken and the egg was discussed: Is inflammation what is causing psychosis, or is psychosis or a predisposition to psychosis causing the inflammation?
There is little knowledge on the link between the two, and Hashwin urged researchers to explore this question, as it could significantly impact early intervention and treatment for many individuals impacted by psychosis.