UTHealth Houston proposes School of Behavioral Health Sciences

Written by: Deborah Lake

A proposed School of Behavioral Health Sciences at UTHealth Houston would create an unprecedented pipeline for health care workers in mental health specialties to provide critical services for Texans.

The unparalleled school would combine behavioral health sciences graduate education with the largest academic behavioral health clinical enterprise in the country.

“This new school will build upon the Texas Legislature’s historic investments in mental health and more than 50 years of excellence in behavioral health sciences at UTHealth Houston,” said Giuseppe N. Colasurdo, MD, UTHealth Houston president and Alkek-Williams Distinguished Chair. “By expanding our capacity for training and services, we will be able to grow the behavioral health workforce for the entire state and provide much-needed mental health care for children and adults.”

The new school would offer degree programs, including master’s and doctoral levels, in addition to new certifications, postdoctoral fellowships, clinical internships, and clinical fellowships.

“This proposed new school is the culmination of extensive research and planning to try to alleviate the dire need for behavioral health care specialists for Texas,” said Jair Soares, MD, PhD, professor and the Pat R. Rutherford, Jr. Chair in Psychiatry in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.

Programs accredited by the American Psychological Association would include the clinical subfields of psychology – clinical psychology, clinical neuropsychology, rehabilitation psychology, and pediatric psychology. The new school would also include degree and certificate programs for psychiatry technicians, community health workers, and licensed chemical dependency counselors.

Academic program development and collaboration with Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston would enhance training and increase the workforce of mental health nurse practitioners. Dual degree programs would include a PhD in behavioral psychology in combination with a Master of Public Health from UTHealth School of Public Health.

“By becoming a school, we would be able to consolidate our resources to provide incomparable education and training to enhance the experience and exposure of our trainees by utilizing our comprehensive inpatient and outpatient clinical settings,” Soares said.

UTHealth Houston provides the clinical training hours for thousands of students through its behavioral health campus that includes the John S. Dunn Behavioral Sciences Center and UTHealth Houston Harris County Psychiatric Center (HCPC), as well as nearly 37 community clinics. A total of 34 schools – state, national, and international – currently send students to UTHealth Houston for additional clinical training and preceptorships. Training programs include medical residencies and fellowships, nursing, psychology, pharmacy, social work, and post-doctoral research.

The Dunn Behavioral Sciences Center, which opened last March with strong legislative support, will include 264 beds when all 11 units are open by the end of 2023, while UTHealth Houston HCPC has 274 beds. Combined, the hospitals make up the largest academic behavioral health complex in the country.

UTHealth Houston, which has the largest number of academic psychiatric faculty members in the state, has integrated behavioral health services into primary care and multispecialty UT Physicians and Harris Health clinics across the city, including medically underserved areas. The university is also a major participant in the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium, including providing telehealth visits for 19 independent school districts for the Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine, and 537 enrolled primary and pediatric care providers through the Child Psychiatry Access Network. UTHealth Houston also provides telehealth services to 15 hospitals statewide, including some state hospital sites.

Students in the new school would have access to a diverse patient population for clinical training in child and adolescent psychology; forensic psychiatry; addiction; psychosis; post-traumatic stress; and geriatric psychology. The school would also offer learning opportunities for research on integrated clinical neuroscience and treatment; mood and anxiety disorders; trauma; grief; childhood disorders; biochemical markers; genetics; and treatment-resistant depression.

UTHealth Houston is seeking $10.5 million per year from the Texas Legislature to establish the new school, including curriculum development, recruiting faculty and staff, accreditation processes, and other expenses.

Mood Disorders Conference is around the corner

Registration for the 2022 UTHealth Houston Mood Disorders Conference: From Neurobiology and Diagnosis to Improved Therapeutics is now open. This two-day conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, October 21-22, at the Cooley Center, located at 7740 Cambridge St, Houston, TX 77054.

Bipolar disorder is a psychiatric condition that causes unusual shifts in mood state, sleep, energy, activity levels, and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 4.4% of adults in the United States experience bipolar disorder at some point in their lives.

Bipolar disorder is highly likely to occur with other psychiatric and medical diagnoses, but these are not always obvious. Some common comorbidities include anxiety and substance use disorder, as well as Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There have been advances in recognition and treatment of these co-occurring disorders in recent years.

The conference will explore the public health significance of bipolar disorder and the extent to which this may justify the development of early intervention strategies for this disorder. Additionally, it will cover recent advances in recognition and treatment of these co-occurring disorders

Course directors Jair Soares, MD, PhD, and Rodrigo Machado-Vieira, MD, PhD, MSc, invite you to attend. This conference is intended for medical professionals, including physicians, psychologists, scientists, nurses and nurses practitioners, physicians assistants, social workers, as well as residents, fellows, interns, and medical students. The conference also provides up to 12.0 continuing education credits. 

Register for the conference here. 

Spotlight:

Albert's journey at UTHealth Houston

Dianne Albert, clinical billing manager at the Faillace Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has been with UTHealth Houston for nearly 30 years. 

Starting out in the UTHealth Houston Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1995, Albert later transfer to psychiatry, and has worked in many different roles over the years. 

Read her full story here.  

Barichello receives grant to study COVID-19 effects on Alzheimer's Disease 

Tatiana Barichello, PhD, associate professor in the Faillace Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Rodrigo Morales, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Neurology, recently received a two-year, $386,628 grant from the Texas Alzheimer’s Research and Care Consortium (TARCC) to study the “Effect of COVID-19 in Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases, and associated protein misfolding.”

TARCC is a collaboration among 10 of the state of Texas’ leading medical research institutions working to improve the early diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately 293 million people have been infected, according to data. Upon infection, the virus may activate the glial cells, non-neuronal cells located within the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system that provide physical and metabolic support to neurons.

Because of this, COVID-19 infection can cause neurological complications, such as anosmia, hyposmia, seizures, psychiatric disorders, and other complications related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Barichello and Morales will explore the potential role of inflammation and infection in long-term cognitive impairment due to COVID-19 infection. In the study, they will test biomarkers of neurodegeneration and overall brain health in blood samples collected from people who had mild symptoms of COVID-19 and compare that with those blood samples from those who were admitted to the intensive care unit.

Only a small amount of data exists studying COVID-19 and long-term cognitive impairment issues. Barichello and Morales are very excited to be working on this project. Morales is also a regular member and Barichello is an associate member of MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

Study shows deep brain stimulation is a potential therapy to treatment-resistant depression 

Written by: Halle Jones

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) to the superolateral branch of the medial forebrain bundle (MFB), which is linked to reward and motivation, revealed metabolic brain changes over 12 months post-DBS implantation, making it a strong potential therapy for treatment-resistant depression according to researchers at UTHealth Houston.

The results of the study, which included 10 patients, were published today in Molecular Psychiatry.

“This is something that people have been trying to do for a long time, but we have not always been very successful with using DBS for psychiatric illnesses,” said first author Christopher Conner, MD, PhD, a former neurosurgery resident in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “But this PET study shows that we’re altering how the brain is functioning long term and we are starting to change the way brain starts to organize itself and starts to process information and data.” Conner is currently a fellow with the University of Toronto.

For years, DBS has been used to treat patients suffering from movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, tremor, and dystonia, and studied as a possible treatment for patients with treatment-resistant depression. In DBS, electrodes are implanted into certain brain areas, where they generate electrical impulses to affect brain activity.

However, finding what part of the brain needs to be targeted to treat depression long term has been challenging.

“We targeted a bundle of fibers that leave this small area in the brainstem to travel to other areas throughout the brain,” Conner said. “The PET scans indicated that this small target area has very diffuse downstream effects. It’s not one single effect because there’s not one single area of the brain linked to depression. The whole brain needs to be changed and through this one small target, that's what we were able to do.”

Researchers performed an initial PET scan before the DBS procedure on the 10 patients in the study for a baseline image. They performed additional PET scans at six and 12 months to assess changes after treatment. Scans of 8 of the 10 patients showed a response.

“A responder to the treatment means that your depression potentially decreases at least 50%; you’re feeling much better,” said co-author João de Quevedo, MD, PhD, professor in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School. “So, for patients with severe chronic treatment-resistant depression, decreasing our symptoms by half is a lot. It’s the difference between being disabled to being able to do something. Correlating with the PET image changes, our patients reported that their depression lessened after the treatment.” De Quevedo also serves as director of the Translational Psychiatry Program and the Treatment-Resistant Depression Program, part of the Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders.

Jair Soares, MD, PhD, professor and the Pat R. Rutherford, Jr. Chair in Psychiatry in the Faillace Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was a co-author. Albert J. Fenoy, MD, former associate professor of neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School, was senior and corresponding author.

Upcoming Conferences!

Innate lymphoid cells in depression: Current status and perspectives - Science Direct - August 2022

Amit Kumar Madeshiyaa, AnilkumarPillai

Epigenetic GrimAge acceleration and cognitive impairment in bipolar disorder - PubMed.gov - July 2022

Camila N C Lima, Robert Suchting, Giselli Scaini, Valeria A Cuellar, Alexandra Del Favero-Campbell, Consuelo Walss-Bass, Jair C Soares, Joao Quevedo, Gabriel R Fries

Brain metabolic changes and clinical response to superolateral medial forebrain bundle deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression - Molecular Psychiatry - August 2022

Christopher R. Conner, Joao Quevedo, Jair C. Soares, Albert J. Fenoy 

Leslie Taylor, PhD, shared tips with KPRC-TV Channel 2 about how parents can prepare their children for the new school year.

Cristian Zeni, MD, PhD, was interviewed by Univision Houston Channel 45 about how parents can talk to their children as they prepare to go back to school. 

Michael Weaver, MD, was interviewed by theSkimm about how long alcohol stays in your system.

Joao de Quevedo, MD, PhD, was quoted in Healio and Yahoo! UK story about a study on deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression.

Ronald E. Acierno, PhD, talked to FOX 26 News about how the 5-year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey may have triggered PTSD for some Houstonians.

Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston

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