The Shirley Brown Chair in Women's Mental Health Research is a partnership between Women's College Research Institute, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and the University of Toronto. It was created by a dynamic community-based fundraising campaign honouring a young lawyer who succumbed to severe depression. The chair links women's mental health research efforts at its three founding institutions and provides a focal point for advocacy on women's mental health issues. The chair helps bring research disciplines together to explore issues that address both the biological and social aspects of women's mental health creating networks that sustaining a holistic program of women's mental health research.
Dr. Sarah Romans served as the Shirley Brown Chair in Women's Mental Health from 2002-2007. During her tenure she established collaborative research groups that linked investigators at Women's College, CAMH and the University of Toronto. She used data from Statistics Canada and other national health surveys to learn more about the factors associated with depression and anxiety in adult women, and she collaborated with investigators in the Violence and Health Research Program to look at how services for abused women might help ameliorate future mental ill-health. She also engaged in more clinically-focused research at Women's College Hospital, working with Dr. Gillian Hawker to study the role of mood in arthritis, and the experiences of depression during pregnancy with graduate student Heather Bennett.
In 2005, Dr. Romans received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to study determinants of mood change in women. Studying the factors that affect mood changes in healthy women may eventually lead to an improved ability to predict and manage more detrimental mood changes. It may also challenge the common presumption that the primary or sole explanation of cyclical mood changes in women is the changes in their reproductive function.
Dr. Romans continues to lead this study at the Women's College Research Institute. With the completion of her five year term as chair, recruitment is now underway for a new chair.
