Bipolar Research at the National Institute of Mental Health

by Erin Adams '08

I spent the month of January interning in Dr. Ellen Leibenluft’s lab at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Leibenluft’s lab conducts research on bipolar children and is part of the Pediatric and Developmental Neuropsychiatry Branch at the NIMH. She has published many articles on child bipolar disorder. In a paper published in 2003 called “Defining Clinical Phenotypes of Juvenile Mania,” she proposes that child mania differs distinctly from adult mania and that developing a new way to classify these cases will lead to better treatments.

Dr. Leibenluft’s lab is running three concurrent students that attempt to identify structural and functional differences in the children’s brains. The children in two of the groups are being tracked to see if these behavior patterns are precursors to a bipolar episode. The at-risk groups are being tracked to determine familial patterns in child bipolar disorder.

My Typical Schedule

• I spent most days inputting data gathered from the psychological assessments of all three groups.
• On some days I attended potential patient evaluations.
• I sat in on Dr. Leibenluft’s full staff lab meetings every Tuesday afternoon and listened to the clinicians, psychiatrists, and research assistants present prospective patients they had contacted.
• Thursday afternoons I met with a post-doc in Dr. Leibenluft’s lab to discuss data entry problems and any questions I had about the types of data being collected or the statistical tests being run.
• Friday mornings I met with Dr. Leibenluft to discuss two or three published papers I had been given the week before. I would prepare questions regarding parts of the papers I didn’t understand or about the current studies being run.

This was my first exposure to clinical research and I enjoyed it much more than the bench work I did last summer. Overall, it was an amazing experience and I am hoping to do more clinical internships in the future.

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