42^nd Global Psychiatry and Mental Health Conference

Biography

Veerle Bergink is Director of the Womens Mental health Center and tenured Professor at the department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is internationally recognized as an expert in the treatment of psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period with a specific interest in bipolar disorder. Dr. Bergink established a prospective postpartum psychosis study in 2008, currently the largest first-onset postpartum psychosis and mania cohort in the world. She has defined a highly effective clinical treatment algorithm for treatment of the acute phase and for the prevention of postpartum relapse. Moreover, her research has provided intriguing evidence for an underlying immunological pathophysiology of postpartum depression, mania, and psychosis. She is leading epidemiological studies and clinical cohort studies and she is the principle investigator on multiple research projects including studies on medication use during pregnancy, neuroimaging of new mothers and their offspring, and the longitudinal course of severe perinatal mood disorders. Work from her group has been consistently funded over the 10 years by large grants from the CDC, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the European Union. She has won multiple prestigious prizes and has published extensively in top-tier journals.

Research Interest

immunological pathophysiology of postpartum depression, mania, and psychosis.