Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Severe mental health disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and anorexia nervosa have an enormous impact on quality of life. Up to 60% of people with these disorders will not respond to treatment resulting in high rates of death and long periods of time in the hospital. We need more information about two areas in mental health treatment: 1) Are there certain factors (for example, gender, age or genetics) that contribute to not responding to treatment? and 2) As there is substantial overlap between mental health disorders, is not responding to a treatment more similar between mental health disorders than different? To answer these questions, I will study individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, or anorexia nervosa. In these individuals, I will look for factors that are linked with not responding to treatment and also whether treatment non-response differs between disorders. This work will be done in Sweden because the resources needed to answer the research questions are only available there. An example of a potential finding might be that people with schizophrenia who are female, of an older age, or have a certain genetic marker, may be more likely to not respond to treatment. This information can be used to develop tests that will help identify people at risk of not responding to a treatment before it is ever given, in order to tailor more aggressive (or different) treatment plans. Successful completion of this proposal could highly impact our understanding of treatments in mental health, and could reduce health care costs and most importantly, reduce the suffering in individuals with these disorders. There are over a million Canadians with a mental health disorder and a high proportion of them will not respond to treatment. If we can figure out earlier that someone will not respond to a treatment, we can give them a better or different treatment sooner.