Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health & Wellness (PMHW)

Director - Leanne Williams, PhD Co-Director - Ruth O'Hara, PhD Co-Director - Max Wintermark, MD In the United States, clinical depression affects more than 16 million people, and each year 44,000 people die by suicide. Dr. Williams wants those numbers reduced by at least 50 percent in her lifetime. As a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and researcher at Stanford, Dr. Leanne Williams has been striving toward that goal with research that uses brain imaging to map precisely how people experience mental illness. The Williams PanLab recently identified five new categories of depression/anxiety based on patterns of brain activation and behavior. Now, with the newly-established Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness at Stanford, Dr. Leanne Williams plans to deepen and broaden her research connecting brain function and mental health, and to translate those discoveries into ways to detect mental disorders earlier, identify optimal treatments faster and ultimately help more patients. The overarching goal is to develop a new model for understanding mental health and treating mental health disorders – particularly for depression, encompassing all stages from the potential risk of depression to chronic, overt disorder. The model will integrate our understanding of the brain with each person’s individual experience, then use these very precise measures to determine, in a very individualized way, what intervention is going to be useful. The measures will include clinical information, genomics, imaging and eventually, information from wearables and data from daily life. Once we have this model in place, the next focus will be to scale lab-based insights into natural-world settings. We’ll reach out to underserved populations, launch a longitudinal cohort study and tackle other mental health disorders.