About Our Psychiatry Department
Psychiatric Care at BIDMC
At BIDMC, our services provide easy access to high-quality, patient-focused, evidence-based care. We are committed to respect and service for all for each individual who receives care here. Our staff collaborates closely with clinicians from other disciplines within the medical center, as well as clinicians from surrounding communities, in order to ensure seamless medical and psychiatric treatment within our system of care.
We offer ambulatory treatment of psychiatric disorders with special areas of focus on:
- Assessment
- Psychopharmacological treatments
- Disorders associated with pregnancy and women’s health
- Psychiatric problems related to cancer
- Neuropsychiatric disorders
- Geriatric psychiatry
We provide both inpatient and outpatient treatment and an active emergency service, and we lead the medical center’s Opioid Addiction Service.
At Massachusetts Mental Health Center, our faculty is involved in serving those with chronic and persistent mental illness in programs that set the standard for care of this population throughout the nation.
Our History
BIDMC's Department of Psychiatry is the product of a merger of three separate Harvard Departments of Psychiatry with rich and complementary histories and orientations. In 1996, the Department at Beth Israel Hospital, grounded in deep traditions in both psychosomatic and psychodynamic psychiatry in the tertiary care setting for over fifty years, and the department at Deaconess Hospital with a more biologic and public psychiatry focus, merged to form the BIDMC Department of Psychiatry. In 2005, the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) joined the BIDMC Department, bringing its hundred-year tradition and unparalleled international reputation in both research and psychiatric education, coupled with its unique coordination of public, private, and academic resources to treat patients with major mental illness and severe psychosocial disadvantage.