Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry

About the Department of Psychiatry For over 85 years we've provided the highest quality care to adults, children and adolescents. We also conduct pioneering research, educate professionals in the field and serve our community. Our Story The story of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry is the story of the best of modern psychiatry. The department, founded in 1934 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, was one of only three general hospital psychiatry services in the country. The department's first chair, Stanley Cobb, MD, was a professor of neuropathology with a vision was to create a psychiatry service in the hospital so medical and surgical inpatients could readily receive psychiatric care. The integration of care for the body and mind provided an alternative to the traditional segregation of psychiatric patients in special facilities. Today, the department is fully integrated into the mainstream of medicine at the hospital. One out of every eight inpatients on a medical or surgical unit receives care from the psychiatric team, four times the national hospital average. The department includes more than 60 specialty clinical and research programs that address virtually every aspect of psychiatric disorders - the brain diseases also known as mental illness - including depression, schizophrenia, and a host of other disorders such as anxiety, panic, attention deficit, bipolar, obsessive compulsive and post-traumatic stress. All are complex, painful, often debilitating conditions that alter the perceptions, feelings and behaviors of those who suffer from them.