Are restraint chairs safer than traditional restraint methods? Reports from the field suggest that restraint chairs are safer and more effective, but there is a lack of scientific literature on the use of these chairs in psychiatric settings to back up the claims. To correct that problem, a team of McLean nurses and leaders took part in a study to examine the use of restraint chairs. Their...
Laura Germine, PhD, calls herself a tinkerer. “I’ve always been messing around with technology—coding, building things,” she said. Fortunately for McLean—and the field of psychiatric research—Germine has moved far beyond tinkering. By combining her academic training in molecular biology, experimental psychopathology, and psychiatric genetics with her passion for technology, she created...
Recent research findings of Dr. Lauren Moran suggest that some medications used to treat ADHD can slightly increase risk for psychosis.
Every day on the job, Dawn Morrissey draws inspiration from McLean Hospital’s past. “When I walk through the hallway leading to the Administration Building on my way to meetings, I always look at the pictures on the wall of the female nurses, doctors, and scientists who have worked at McLean over the years,” she said. “These are women—like Emma Mooers, MD, the first female researcher at McLean,...
“We’ve seen cases of people coming in without much of a psychiatric history who are developing this sort of first episode of psychosis in the setting of stimulant use.” – Dr. Lauren Moran
Watch Dr. Lauren V. Moran describe the findings of her new paper linking some ADHD medications to a higher risk of psychosis.
Certain drugs prescribed to teens and young adults with ADHD increase their risk of psychosis, say researchers at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Approximately 5 million individuals in the US under the age of 25 are prescribed these drugs for the treatment of ADHD. The researchers evaluated the two most common ADHD treatments and found that, although the risk of psychosis is low, it...
According to a new study by Dr. Lauren Moran, ADHD patients taking amphetamines might be at an increased risk for psychosis.
The research of Dr. Lauren A. Rutter suggests that our sensitivity to facial expressions of emotions changes as we age.
Watch how McLean researcher Dr. Laura Rutter and her team researched how sensitivity to emotions changes with as we age.
Dr. Lauren Rutter is co-author of a new paper indicating that older adults are happier because they view social situations more positively.
“These findings fit well with other research showing that older adults tend to have more positive emotions and a positive outlook.” – Dr. Lauren Rutter
As a trained certified public accountant (CPA), Raquel Espinosa followed a unique path to McLean, where she oversees the hospital’s Research Administration. However, the detail-oriented work involved in becoming a CPA turns out to have been a perfect training ground for Espinosa, who uses her love of organizational and financial management to oversee the research infrastructural support for 150...
Why do we become more positive as we grow older? Why are adolescents so sensitive to negative social cues? These are a few of the questions addressed in “Emotion Sensitivity Across the Lifespan: Mapping Clinical Risk Periods to Sensitivity to Facial Emotion Intensity,” a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The paper presents findings from a groundbreaking...
Dr. Staci Gruber discusses the challenges of conducting clinical research on marijuana.
Researchers at McLean Hospital will lead a five-year study to investigate the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to treat severe agitation and aggression in people with Alzheimer’s disease. The study was made possible by a five-year grant, expected to total $11.8 million, from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) under award number R01AG06110001. Part of the National Institutes of Health,...
This edition of Discovery demonstrates some of the depth and breadth of research at McLean Hospital. With hundreds of hardworking researchers who hail from all parts of the world, our robust research program has all the tools to bring research from the bench to the bedside. There is much more transformative research that we couldn’t include in this issue, including the ongoing work in the Center...
The transition out of an inpatient psychiatric setting is never easy—for the patient or the clinician. And the challenge escalates after the day program ends and the patient returns home. Now, clinicians at McLean Hospital’s Behavioral Health Partial Hospital Program (BHP), a day program that integrates psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy (medications), believe they have a way to improve on that...
Imagine if depression or obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) could be treated with non-drug therapies, such as those currently being used to tackle Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. Suzanne Haber, PhD, is working toward that goal in her labs at McLean Hospital and the University of Rochester Medical Center. For the moment, the research focus is “to understand how the brain is...
For a substance that has been used by humans for more than 5,000 years, there remains much to learn about marijuana’s effects on the brain. McLean neuroscientist and clinical researcher Staci Gruber, PhD, has spent more than two decades trying to advance knowledge in this domain. Now, with the help of a $1.5 million grant from the Patricia Cornwell Foundation, a nonprofit organization created by...
