Welcome to our Behavioral Health Research Group (BHRG) website!
BHRG investigators, affiliated with Case Western Reserve University/ University Hospitals of Cleveland Department of Psychiatry, are committed to the study and advancement of care in people with disorders of the brain and nervous system. The recent COVID pandemic has underscored how important mental health is to whole-health and the critical need to make mental health care available to all in an equitable and efficient manner. The BHRG investigators are a multidisciplinary team of researchers with psychologists, psychiatrists and research scientists with expertise in brain science.
We hope to continue work along a number of research foci including:
- Research at the interface of neurology and psychiatry: The boundary of Brain and Mind
- The study of traditionally hard-to-treat populations with serious mental illness, with a goal of helping to close the gap that exists between the relatively high levels of treatment efficacy seen in controlled clinical trials for individuals with mental disorders, and the relatively low levels of treatment effectiveness seen in underserved or disadvantaged populations. This includes individuals receiving care in the community, individuals with medical comorbidities, individuals who are non-adherent or partially adherent with medications, and older adults with mood and psychotic disorders.
- Child and adolescent mental health
- Global brain health
- mHealth tools
- The harmonization of psychiatric and neurological study data from national and international sites in order to create integrated databases that allow researchers to investigate brain health questions that can’t be answered by smaller, stand-alone datasets.
- Psychopharmacology of psychosis and mood disorders
- Clinical trials
- Psychiatric rating scales
We feel fortunate to be able to conduct our work in a setting that is supportive and appreciate the trainees/students, patients and their families that have helped us in this important work. While the BHRG team has had a number of recent successes over the past year in terms of grant funding and new project start-ups, we believe that the future will yield even more important gains across a broad range of topics and health care needs.
Martha Sajatovic MD Jennifer Levin PhD Molly McVoy MD