Welcome to the University of Florida College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry.  As you can tell, the Department of Psychiatry is headquartered in the McKnight Brain Institute, a wonderful state of the art facility that has the chairs of neurology, neuroscience, and psychiatry and many important collaborative neurobiological research studies ongoing here on the campus of the College of Medicine.  So here we are, and as you can see in the background we are so close to campus that you can see the tower, you can walk to the stadium, you can walk to most the main academic research facilities from the College of Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry’s headquarters.

The  Department of Psychiatry is rapidly growing at the University of Florida We are quite lucky that we have the support of the Dean of the College of Medicine and numerous philanthropic efforts that have all brought together great consensus among many people in Florida that we need more research in geriatrics, more research in autism and child and adolescent psychiatry, more research  in depression and prevention of suicide, more research in addicition and onset of  addictive drug use. All this has worked together to  help us develop a research mission that is very coherent and goes across disciplines. The Department of Psychiatry is, as I said, in the Brain Institute on campus, across from the College of Medicine, across from the Veterans Administration hospital.  We are very fortunate to have the first or the second largest number of patients at the VA who have psychiatric problems that we are able to help.  We are working with them all of the time.  We provide services in the hospital with a very active consult service and have an emerging program in community psychiatry that you will see on our website where we actually do mission like work-street level work-helping people where they live in the streets of Jacksonville or in Daytona Beach and Indian River County. 

We have an important project on campus as well with almost six full time psychiatrists delivering psychiatric services to studenta at the University of Florida on campus at Student Mental Health and also seeing the citizens of the surrounding Alachua and Marion counties in our Emergency Room. All of that gives you an idea of the various divisions working together. It does not give you an idea about what a great place to live Gainesville is, what a great College of Medicine we have and how supportive they are of both the addiction and psychiatry missions.  One way to give you an idea is  for you to visit, but if you can’t visit, look throughout the website. Look at Vista, look at Florida Recovery Center, look at our children’s program. These are programs that have been widely recognized as among the best in the state and in some cases in the United States. Our program at Vista  and Springhill allow us to deliver evaluation and treatment services to impaired healthcare professionals from California to Maine to Florida. Just today we have 50 professionals living and going to treatment at our facility just nearby.-that we call the Florida Recovery Center.

Those clinical missions are very important, but we don’t lose sight of our research mission to develop and test new treatments, go from bench to besdside-our community mission to provide access to treatment to people in our area as well as Jacksonville, Daytona, and Indian River County- our educational mission, we are actively involved in the education of undergraduates, graduate students who are getting interdisciplinary neuroscience Ph.D.’s, medical students, interns and residents. All of these education efforts have increased tremendously as have our efforts to educate and collaborate within this wonderful medical center, in CME activities with neurology , with neurosurgery for brain stimulation  ando ther emerging treatments , with neuroscience, with public health in food policy whether food is addicting.

We are very very proud of our faculty. I could spend the next hour or more talking about all of the great things that our faculty have done and continue to do in mentoring young people, reaching out the community with community service,  in education, treatment, prevention as well as research. I hope you get a chance to look through the website and see all of the great things going on. I am hopeful that by the time you do , we will have 60 geographically full time academic physician faculty here at the University of Florida, College of Medicine.  This makes  us one of the largest addiction medicine groups and training programs in the United States and one of the fastest growing psychiatric training research and education programs in theUnited States as well. Thank you very much.

Mark S. Gold, M.D.
Dizney Eminent Scholar Distinguished Professor and Chair

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