Advancing Mental Health Care: Innovation and Team Science
As Chair of the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, I take great pride in the accomplishments of our faculty and their contributions to the tripartite mission. Our department brings together a remarkable range of clinical programs, educational opportunities, and research initiatives, united by a common mission to improve the lives of people affected by mental illness.
One of our greatest strengths is the breadth of our clinical affiliations. Baylor Medicine serves as our home base, providing outpatient psychiatric and psychological services, including specialty care for complex conditions. At Ben Taub Hospital and throughout Harris Health, our faculty care for some of Houston’s most vulnerable populations. The Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center provides comprehensive mental health services to veterans, while The Menninger Clinic offers nationally recognized specialty psychiatric care. At Texas Children’s Hospital, our faculty address the mental health needs of children and adolescents. Together, these institutions allow us to serve patients across the lifespan and in settings ranging from community clinics to highly specialized treatment programs.
The diversity of these clinical settings is also a tremendous asset to our educational mission. Our medical students, psychiatry residents, fellows, and psychology trainees benefit from exposure to different patient populations, treatment approaches, and models of care. We strive to provide an environment that fosters clinical excellence, intellectual curiosity, and collaboration across disciplines.
Research is the third pillar of our mission. As I emphasized in a previous Chair’s Message, I believe that advances in psychiatry increasingly depend on team science—bringing together investigators with complementary expertise to address complex problems that no single discipline can solve alone.
An example is our NIH-funded research on deep brain stimulation (DBS) for treatment-resistant bipolar depression. This project brings together psychiatrists, psychologists, neurosurgeons, engineers, neuroanatomists, brain imaging specialists, neurologists, and medical ethicists. Beyond evaluating DBS as a potential treatment, we are combining recordings of brain activity with data from smartphones and wearable devices to identify changes in mood and behavior. The broader goal is to develop new approaches to detecting emerging depressive or manic episodes and intervening before they become severe. This work illustrates how team science can advance our understanding of mental illness and lead to innovations with far-reaching clinical implications.
I am particularly proud that our department’s clinical, educational, and research missions are so closely intertwined. Our patients inspire our research, our research informs clinical care, and both enrich the training of the next generation of mental health professionals. It is the dedication and collaborative spirit of our faculty, learners, and staff that make these accomplishments possible.
Wayne K. Goodman, M.D.
D.C. and Irene Ellwood Professor and Chair
Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences