Origins of Research Questions Posted on November 13, 2007 Boris Birmaher (bio) explains his interest in clinical research.

My main interest is in children and adolescents with bipolar disorder, with depression, and also children with anxiety. I work on almost everything, how this illness look like in children, what happens with them over time, why they have these illnesses, what happened with their families, how to treat them both with medications, also with psychosocial treatment.

In order to do this, we have a nice clinic that we developed almost nine years ago where we have referrals of the children from all the city, around all the city and also from other states. Then the clinic is quite well staffed with nurses, social workers and psychologists and two or three child psychiatrists. And then seeing all these kids daily gives us a good feeling about all the issues that we are studying and most of our research questions are derived from our daily work with these families.

In addition, we have once a month meetings with the parents, we have a parent group and then we meet during the evenings for three, four hours and from these meetings also we ask the parents what they think we should be studying and doing better. I think part of our research grants have derived their ideas from the parents, not from us.

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