Francesca Belouad, MA, is a Research Psychologist in GEB-SDGE. She is responsible for administrating interviews and overseeing clinical aspects of the NIMH Family Study. Francesca has been employed as a Research Psychologist at the NIMH since 2000, when she was recruited by Dennis Charney, MD, during the formation of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Program. Prior to this, she held research positions at the Section on Development Psychology at the NIMH, Outpatient Psychiatry at the Washington Veterans Medical Center, and the Department of Medical and Clinical Psychology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
Francesca s work has focused on the writing and submission of the original NIMH Family Study protocol and the development and selection of research measures. She currently administers headache, psychiatric, sleep, and family history interviews to adults and children at initial and follow-up time points. She conducts reviews of clinical assessments a
Rapidly-Acting Treatments for Treatment-Resistant Depression (RAPID)
Rapidly-Acting Treatments for Treatment-Resistant Depression (RAPID) is an NIMH-funded research project that promotes development of speedier therapies for severe, treatment-resistant depression. The initiative is supporting a team of researchers, led by Maurizio Fava, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital, who are identifying and testing promising pharmacological and/or non-pharmacological treatments that lift depression within a few days.
By contrast, current antidepressant medications usually take a few weeks to work – and half of patients fail to fully respond. While a proven brain stimulation technique, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), works faster, it runs a risk of cognitive side-effects and requires anesthesia and a surgical setting. The urgent need for improved, faster acting antidepressant treatments is underscored by the fact that severe depression can be life-threatening, due to heightened risk of
Section on Molecular Neuroscience Staff
Lee E. Eiden is the Chief of the Section on Molecular Neuroscience in the National Institute of Mental Health Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois, and Ph.D. in Pharmacology from The University of Kansas, and was a Staff Fellow, PRAT Fellow, and Senior Staff Fellow in the NIMH Intramural Research Program before joining the faculty as a Principal Investigator and Chief of the Unit on Cell Biology in 1987, and Chief of the Section on Molecular Neuroscience in 1992. His work at the NIH has focused on stimulus-secretion-synthesis coupling, characterization of the vesicular and secretory proteins mediating chemically coded neurotransmission, including chromogranin A, VMAT1, VMAT2, and VAChT and signaling pathways underlying neuropeptide-mediated stress responses. More recently, the laboratory has been involved in micr