The UAB Depression and Suicide Center offers advanced therapies for patients dealing with the most severe and often treatment resistant forms of major depression. One in three patients treated for depression will be unresponsive to marketed oral antidepressant drugs and may be considered to have a form of treatment resistant depression or TRD. A major goal of our center is to connect patients to the right treatment for their depression. For those patients with the most severe forms of depression, this is being accomplished through the newly launched Procedural Psychiatry Clinic, led by Dr. Soumya Sivaraman, an assistant professor in the UAB Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology.
Since its inception the center has offered treatment for patients through the TRD clinic, which remains active and sees more than 200 patients per month. The goal of the procedural clinic is for Dr. Sivaraman to provide another option for patients with the most treatment resistant forms of depression through trials of advanced or experimental therapies. The procedural clinic evaluates a patient’s depression using a biopsychosocial approach and develops a personally tailored treatment plan that can include psychotherapy through the UAB PRIT clinic (previously described in this newsletter), electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), intranasal esketamine, intravenous ketamine, and access to clinical trials of novel mechanism of action drugs and devices.