William Beardslee, M.D.
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William Beardslee, M.D., is the academic chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and Gardner Monks professor of Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Beardslee has a longstanding research interest in the development of children at risk because of severe parental mental illness. He has been especially interested in the protective effects of self-understanding in enabling youngsters and adults to cope with adversity and has studied self-understanding in civil-rights workers, survivors of cancer, and children of parents with affective disorders.
Dr. Beardslee has received the Blanche F. Ittleson award of the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding published research contributing to the mental health of children, has been a Faculty Scholar of the William T. Grant foundation, and in 1999, received the Irving Philips Award for Prevention and the Catcher in the Rye Award for Advocacy for Children from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
In 2003, he received the Agnes Purcell McGavin Award for Prevention of Mental Disorder in Children from the American Psychiatric Association. Currently, Dr. Beardslee directs the Preventive Intervention Project, an NIMH-funded study to explore the effects of a clinician-facilitated, family-based preventive intervention designed to enhance resiliency and family understanding for children of parents with affective disorder.
He is also the principal investigator of the Boston site of a new four-site prevention of depression trial using a cognitive behavioral group approach for children at double risk because their parents are depressed and they themselves are already manifesting symptoms of depression.
Dr. Beardslee also serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Mental Health Services of SAMHSA and on the Carter Center Task Force on Mental Health. He is the author of over 100 articles and chapters and two books: The Way Out Must Lead In: Life Histories in the Civil Rights Movement, a story of what enables civil rights workers to endure; and Out of the Darkened Room: When a Parent Is Depressed: Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family, a book about how parents and caregivers can help families overcome depression.
Dr. Beardslee received his B.A. from Haverford College and his M.D. from Case Western Reserve University. He trained in general psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and in child psychiatry and psychiatric research at Children’s Hospital in Boston. He is married and has four children.
Page last updated: 11/06/2006