The story of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry is the story of the best of modern psychiatry.
The department includes more than 50 specialty clinical and research programs that address virtually every aspect of psychiatric disorders – the brain diseases also known as mental illness – including depression, schizophrenia, and a host of other disorders such as anxiety, panic, attention deficit, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, and post-traumatic stress. All are complex, painful, often debilitating conditions that alter the perceptions, feelings and behaviors of those who suffer.
Psychiatry is a field of brain study and repair, notes Jerrold F. Rosenbaum, MD, the departments seventh and current chief of Psychiatry. In decades past, the mind and body, or should I say mind and brain, were seen as different and distinct. Modern psychiatry sees them as one. Our organ of interest in psychiatry is the brain, and what a marvelously and infinitely complex one it is.