Learn About Us

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine has occupied a distinguished place in the field of psychiatry since the opening of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in 1913. Today, we continue our long tradition of excellence in patient care, teaching and research.

Founded with a dual mission to serve the surrounding community and to care for patients with the most challenging illnesses, we provide community psychiatric services as well as consultation clinics, inpatient units, and day hospitals in more than a dozen specialty areas.

Our clinical research programs, which are closely tied to patient care, range from efficacy and treatment-response studies to clinical trials and epidemiology. The basic research we conduct encompasses bioinformatics, genetics, neuroscience, and molecular biology. All of these efforts strive to unlock the causal pathways to the major psychiatric conditions and to use this knowledge to develop practical means to improve recognition, diagnosis, and treatment of these conditions.

The depth of our clinical expertise and the breadth of our research programs allow us to train medical students and to produce the next generation of psychiatrists and scientists to be clinical and research leaders.

HIGHLIGHTS

We are ranked as the top psychiatry programsin the United States for clinical care according to U.S. News and World Report.

Our department treats a higher percentage of medically compromised psychiatric patient than any other hospital in Maryland.

Our expert team is devoted to the treatment of the chronically mentally ill, the indigent, and the most complex psychiatric cases requiring multidisciplinary treatments.

The department also consistently ranks nationally among the top departments in psychiatric research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

SUMMARY STATISTICS

Fiscal Year 2009

OUR PERSPECTIVE

The perspective of the department is explained in a lecture by Paul R. McHugh M.D., former chairman, entitled:

A Structure For Psychiatry At The Century's Turn
The View From Johns Hopkins

Paul R. McHugh M.D.
Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Lecture read to Section of Psychiatry, 11 June 1991
Burroughs Wellcome Visiting Professor in Clinical Medicine

Published in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1992; 85: 483-487

Published lecture