Right after the 19th century, Americans with mental illness were not a lot diagnosed and treated as managed and sheltered. People with schizophrenia, alcoholism and depression were housed alongside people with cerebral palsy, epilepsy and feeblemindedness. In the late 1890s, ‘UM’ Professor of Nervous Diseases and Electrotherapeutics William Herdman of the Hair and Nails, demonstrates his curiosity about the genetic underpinnings of most of the symptoms he observed in his patients, and his willingness to conduct research that, for his day, was rigorous and revolutionary. For instance, one question, let’s say, asked for the patient’s narrative, in a brand new relationship between medicine and psychiatry. Greden currently serves as the executive director of the University of Michigan Depression Center, a place where behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, clinical investigators and multidisciplinary leaders from other schools and departments across campus, like Nursing, Public Health, Pharmacy, Social Work and Psychology, come together to share information, collaborate on research, and offer patients the most ‘uptodate’ and comprehensive treatments available.
Dalack’s clinical and research interests have focused on severe and persistent psychiatric illnesses, particularly the co morbidity of nicotine addiction and schizophrenia.
His current scholarly interests include developing methods to monitor and manage the weight gain and metabolic changes caused by atypical antipsychotics, and studies to learn the mechanisms underlying the ‘co occurrence’ of mood disorders and heart disease.
Dalack is passionate about the field of psychiatry for the importance it places on making connections with patients and encouraging their inner strengths in helping them cope with illness. UM faculty members and nurses strived to care for an unending stream of desperate patients while knowing virtually nothing about what caused psychiatric disorders, and without any way to evaluate underlying brain functions. Today, a few hundred UM faculty and hundreds of nurses, social workers, therapists, and trainees of all kinds make powerful, tangible differences in the lives of thousands of patients in the Department of Psychiatry and the Depression Center in the Rachel Upjohn Building.