The origin, experience, and treatment of dissociative identity disorder (DID) are often misunderstood. When patients come into Milissa Kaufman’s office for treatment for DID, they do not put on different hats, speak in different accents, or display different mannerisms. The thought that they would...
Drs. Lauren A. M. Lebois, Milissa Kaufman, and colleagues find that brain imaging analyses can uncover changes in functional connections between brain regions linked to an individual’s dissociative symptoms following trauma.
Being traumatized can cause what are known as dissociative symptoms—such as experiencing amnesia, an out-of-body experience, feeling emotionally numb—which may help people cope. Experiencing these symptoms intensely or for a long time, however, can negatively impact an individual’s ability to...
Lauren A.M. Lebois, PhD, Milissa Kaufman, MD, PhD, and colleagues discover that MRI boosted by machine learning reveals changes in brains of women with PTSD.
Milissa Kaufman, MD, PhD, is McLean Hospital’s nominee for the 2020 Excellence in Mentoring Awards. Presented by Harvard Medical School, the award recognizes “the value of quality mentoring relationships and the impact they have on professional development and career advancement in basic/clinical...
In a television interview on April 5, 2020, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams compared our experience of the coronavirus pandemic to epic struggles of the past. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment,” Adams said. Psychological reactions are a normal part of such big events,...
Perhaps one of the most misused words in modern society, “trauma” is used in daily language to describe all sorts of unpleasant or uncomfortable situations. But for 5-10% of the population, trauma and the accompanying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a very precise condition with very real...
The book Sybil and the subsequent 1976 movie in which Sally Field portrayed a girl with more than a dozen different personalities were the result of a collaboration between psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur and author Flora Rheta Schreiber. The goal was to have people better understand a child abuse...
For her work in the assessment and treatment of acute stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and dissociative disorders, McLean Hospital’s Milissa Kaufman, MD, PhD, was honored with the 2018 Cornelia B. Wilbur Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma and...
Drs. Milissa Kaufman and Lauren A.M. Lebois described how trauma affects the brain.
Through clinical practice and neuroimaging studies, McLean Hospital’s Milissa Kaufman, MD, PhD, and Lauren A.M. Lebois, PhD, are revealing the clinical, cognitive, and neurobiological underpinnings of the effect of trauma on the brain, specifically in women, including long-misunderstood forms of...
Milissa Kaufman, MD, PhD, medical director of the Hill Center for Women and director of the Dissociative Disorders and Research Program, was recently awarded the prestigious 2017 Jonathan O. Cole Award. The annual award—established in 2006, thanks to a gift from the Fleetwing Charitable Foundation—...
McLean Hospital recently received a $2 million gift from an anonymous family that will have far-reaching impact on the field of trauma disorders and, in particular, a special influence on women’s mental health. $1.5 million of the gift has created an endowment to support an annual Trauma Studies...
Milissa Kaufman, MD, PhD, graduated from the combined MD/PhD program at Boston University. As a doctoral student, she trained with Dr. Terence Keane at the National Center for PTSD in Boston. Her research focused on assessment and treatment of trauma-spectrum disorders including acute stress...
Please Note: Treatment in some of McLean’s programs has been moved online due to the COVID-19 crisis. Please contact the program directly for more information. At the Hill Center for Women, we offer psychiatric and psychological services for women with histories of trauma and related disorders,...
