From Discovery to Recovery: NARSAD Awards for Six Brilliant Researchers

NARSAD has been preparing for its Mental Health Research Symposium in New York City and its ‘Discovery to Recovery’ National Awards Dinner – both next Friday, October 29. In the last several weeks I’ve had the chance to learn more about our six Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award Winners and three Productive Lives Award Winners. The scientific award winners have a long list of accomplishments, research studies and discoveries after their names. Their research on schizophrenia, mood disorders, cognitive neuroscience, and childhood and adolescent disorders is focused on improving the lives of people with mental illness.

The 2010 Productive Lives Award Winners are individually accomplished professionals, and have each written about their own personal struggles with mental illness in best-selling books. Their recoveries demonstrate that it is possible to live full, productive lives – even while struggling with mental illness.

Click on their names below to learn more and join me in a collective sigh of admiration at what these awardees have accomplished along the road from discovery to recovery:

Scientific Award Winners
Lieber Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Schizophrenia Research
Ming T. Tsuang, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc.
University of California, San Diego

Outstanding Achievement Prize for Mood Disorders Research
Lars Vedel Kessing, M.D., D.M.Sc.
University of Copenhagen

Ruane Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Childhood Psychiatric Disorders
Avshalom Caspi, Ph.D.
Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and Institute of Psychiatry/King’s College London
Terrie E. Moffitt, Ph.D.
Duke University and Institute of Psychiatry and Neuroscience/King’s College London

Goldman-Rakic Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Cognitive Neuroscience
Robert C. Malenka, M.D., Ph.D.
Stanford University School of Medicine

Sidney R. Baer Jr. Prize for Schizophrenia Research
Stephen J. Glatt, Ph.D.
State University of New York, Upstate Medical University

Productive Lives Award Winners
Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. Her best-known book, An Unquiet Mind, chronicles her own devastating, near-fatal experiences with manic depression.

Elyn Saks is a distinguished legal scholar, Ph.D. in psychoanalytic science, best-selling author and recipient of a 2009 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. In her book, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, she relates her 30-year struggle with schizophrenia. Dr. Saks is the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School, and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

Andrew Solomon is an award-winning novelist, journalist, critic and essayist, who has written on subjects ranging from art and travel, to psychology and Proust. Most recently and famously, he wrote The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, an exhaustively researched survey of the history and science of depression and an intensely personal recounting of his own and others’ painful encounters with depression. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and has endowed the Solomon Summer Research Fellowships at Yale University in Gay and Lesbian Studies.

by Barbara Wheeler,
Manager of communications and media relations