Research to Optimize Women’s Mental Health
Dr. Kimberly Yonkers is the Katz Family Chair in Psychiatry and departmental chair. For the past 20 years, she has conducted pivotal research on women’s mental health. Her work established serotonin reuptake inhibitors as the gold standard treatment for premenstrual dysphoric disorder and, in a separate initiative, showed that mental health mood changes are present in pregnancy as well as the postpartum interval. Her team was one of the early groups focused on the improvement of mental health among pregnant and postpartum individuals with addiction.
Meet the Team:
Kimberly Yonkers, MD
Katz Family Chair, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Major Accomplishments:
Dr. Kim Yonkers was recruited to be an ex officio member of the Future of DSM committee, an APA committee that is strategizing and planning for DSM-6.
Dr. Yonkers presented Grand Rounds at Washington University School of Medicine and the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Dr. Yonkers began her first term as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
Dr. Yonkers and her lab continued enrollment for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Development of a Text Intervention for Perinatal Depression project that is a text messaging intervention to help pregnant individuals at risk of perinatal depression to develop resilience strategies that can potentially help them avoid an episode of depression; her lab continued recruitment for the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded Scaling Up: A Multi-Site Trial of e-SBI for Alcohol Use in Pregnancy project that aims to help pregnant individuals minimize or stop drinking in pregnancy. She is setting up a trial of a short-term transcranial magnetic stimulation trial (SAINT) for postpartum depression. This is a multicenter trial funded by the Department of Defense.
