Congratulations to Dr. Patel for being honored with The Gerald L. Klerman Awards from the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. The Gerald L. Klerman Award is the highest honor DBSA gives to members of the scientific community. Presented each year with winners selected by the SAB, this award recognizes researchers whose work expands knowledge of the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of depression and bipolar disorder. Gerald L. Klerman was an educator, researcher, clinician, author, and administrator who specialized in depression, schizophrenia, panic, and other anxiety disorders. Klerman conducted the first clinical trial showing the efficacy of medication and psychotherapy in preventing recurrent depression and led the first large-scale, multi-site study to understand the diagnosis, course, and genetics of major depression.
Vikram Patel, MD, PhD (Senior Investigator Award): Patel is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at the Harvard Medical School. His research as a psychiatrist over the past two decades has generated evidence on the burden and impact of mental disorders and on strategies to deploy community resources for their prevention and care. Dr. Patel’s work has focused on common mental health problems, in particular depression, but he’s also worked on a range of other mental health conditions across the life course, from autism to harmful drinking and psychoses. His earlier work showed that depression is a universal cause of human suffering, strongly associated with social disadvantage and deprivation, and leading to premature mortality, disability, and discrimination. In 2019 Dr. Patel launched the EMPOWER initiative, which seeks to use digital technologies to build a community-based workforce to deliver evidence-based psychosocial interventions in the U.S. and low-resource countries.