Center for Intergenerational Psychiatry (CIP)

Mission

The Center for Intergenerational Psychiatry (CIP) at Columbia Psychiatry is a center of excellence committed to studying the transmission of vulnerability and resilience to mental illness between and across generations and to develop interventions and preventive strategies to interrupt and avert this transmission, limiting the impact of mental illness earlier than ever thought possible. The Center’s expertise spans epidemiology, developmental neuroscience, neuroimaging and psychophysiology, data science, genetics, epigenetics, and maternal-fetal biology. With a strong focus on mental health equity, we dedicate substantial efforts to produce knowledge relevant to under-served individuals. CIP aims to advance scientific inquiry about how, where, and in what familial and social contexts neural and behavioral development goes awry and how we can mitigate these processes passed from generation to generation leading to poor mental health.

Approach

Our goal is to translate scientific information into effective interventions early to decrease the risk of illness and promote health and resilience for individuals and families. Consistent collaboration across various disciplines will increase the pace of discovery by facilitating the movement from the laboratory to the clinic with an integrated team of scientists spanning the necessary research and clinical areas of expertise.

The Center for Intergenerational Psychiatry will accelerate scientific discovery relevant for intergenerational transmission of psychiatric disorders, working from bench to bedside, from fetus to adolescence and beyond. To accomplish our goals,
we will continue to develop our existing intergenerational cohorts and sustain ad build new intergenerational cohorts, with a strong focus on under-resourced populations. Additionally, the Center will work with existing CUIMC resources and private donors to establish an Intergenerational Psychiatry biobank.

The Center will work toward translating research findings about intergenerational processes into improved clinical services and interventions in psychiatry. We will achieve this by disseminating our work to professional and clinical associations, clinician education settings, and policymaking organizations focused on improving the lives of children and families. An added focus for CIP will be training and dissemination.

We intend to establish a training program in the field of Intergenerational Psychiatry and a biannual international symposium on Intergenerational Psychiatry.