The Black Dog Institute has a strong commitment to and a strong track record in research. Such research provides the Institute with important data about the nature of clinical depression, Bipolar Disorder and related areas.
Research findings, based on the large number of patients assessed since 1985, enhance the expertise and clinical skills of our clinicians. Such findings provide a rich environment for teaching and training other professionals in the area of mood disorders and enable the Institute to identify areas that are promising for further research and clinical investigation.
The Institute is committed to continuing research work building on the very successful Mood Disorders Unit (MDU) period, primarily funded through NHMRC grants. It is intended that the MDU name will be continued for the research activities centre.
Our longstanding focus has been to redress the limitations in the current formal classifications of depressive disorders which weight severity, ignore causes, lead to non-specific research findings and compromise the identification of disorder-specific treatments. We seek instead to model and define clinically and phenotypically distinct, or cause-weighted, depressive disorders in order to identify treatments that are specific to particular disorders, and so advance clinical management.
Our research is organised under 5 research streams: (take a look at a Flash illustration of the research streams)
Stream 1 – Determinants
and Phenomenology
Studies in this stream reflect our long-standing interest in integrating both
the psychosocial and biological causes of mood disorders.
Stream 2 – Vulnerability,
Resilience and Quest
These studies look at the importance of resilience as a protective
factor against the depressive disorders.
Stream 3 – Assessment
and Innovative Interventions
These studies:
Stream 4 – Studying Treatment
Resistance
In this stream our studies focus on devising a clinically meaningful
model of treatment resistance that helps in understanding the causes and makes
therapy more rational.
Stream 5 – Functioning,
Disability and Other Sequelae
Studies in this stream assess the long-term disability and burden
of depressive and bipolar disorders and their causes.
Page last updated: 26-Nov-2007
Depression and Bipolar Disorder Information Australia - Black Dog Institute.
Copyright © 2008 Black Dog Institute
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