Frontiers in Psychiatric Treatment: Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period

Frontiers in Psychiatric Treatment is a webinar series designed to equip clinicians with the latest knowledge about advances in patient care through digestible, clinically relevant updates across an array of subspecialties. On Wednesday, August 31, Veerle Bergink, MD, PhD, covered recent developments in mental health treatment during pregnancy and the postpartum period.
Speaker: Dr. Bergink is the director of Mount Sinai’s Women’s Mental Health Program, and Professor of Psychiatry and Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. From 2004 to 2018, she treated patients at Erasmus University hospital in Rotterdam, where she led the Acute Inpatient Unit, the Mother-Baby Unit, and the Center of Excellence in Perinatal Psychiatry. She then moved to New York City to lead Mount Sinai’s Women’s Mental Health Program. Her research career started in 2008 when she established a prospective postpartum psychosis study, 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 also for the prevention of postpartum relapse.
Moreover, her research has provided intriguing evidence for an underlying immunological pathophysiology of postpartum depression, mania and psychosis. Since 2014 she is involved in epidemiological studies at the National Centre for Register-Based Research in Denmark, examining intergenerational psychopathology and medication use during pregnancy. She has been the principle investigator on multiple research project including studies on lithium and antidepressant use during pregnancy, neuroimaging of new mothers and their offspring and the longitudinal course of severe perinatal mood disorders. Her work has been funded by various sources such as the NIH, European Union, the Dutch Government, and private foundations.