Welcome from the UCSD Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Benjamin Maxwell, M.D.

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, UC San Diego School of Medicine
Division Chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, UC San Diego Department of Psychiatry
Una Davis Family Chair in Behavioral Health at Rady Children's Hospital of San Diego

It is with great pleasure that I introduce our UC San Diego Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Rady Children's Hospital of San Diego. Our division reflects a major thrust forward in an exciting era of child and family mental health. In many ways we are tantamount to an entirely new program. With the recruitment of faculty from other major institutions, the establishment of new clinical programs, the embarkation on major research, the inclusion of new seminars, conferences, training and Grand Rounds, and one of the largest partnerships in the nation between a major academic medical center and a designated children's hospital, we are proud of what we have accomplished in a relatively short time. Moreover, we have created an environment for education that will provide a personalized training experience while leaving fellows highly skilled and ready for clinical and leadership positions in any treatment setting they choose. 

We offer a full range of compassionate, evidence-based, and interdisciplinary services to children and families with behavioral health needs in San Diego County and beyond. Rady Children's Hospital of San Diego is the safety net hospital for children and families in our county, ensuring that all children are cared for regardless of socioeconomic status, race, religion, gender, or background. Our intensive and higher acuity services include a brand new state-of-the-art pediatric psychiatry emergency department, inpatient psychiatry, consultation services, and a full spectrum of both inpatient, step-down (IOP/PHP), and outpatient eating disorders treatment programs. Our outpatient programs include county-contracted services for our most underserved families and communities, a continuity clinic at our behavioral health urgent care, and our newest mental health integration clinics which feature a hub and spoke model and train primary care physicians to provide high quality, evidence-based mental health treatment to child and families in multiple locations. The Rady Children's Hospital Chadwick Center specializes in the treatment of trauma, particularly in young children, with an emphasis on the importance of early childhood intervention, attachment, and dyadic treatment. Our Autism Discovery Institute and Alexa's PLAYC (Playful Learning Academy for Young Children) provide a full range of evaluation, treatment, and observation of children across the developmental spectrum. The vast majority of both our intensive inpatient and our outpatient programs offer a myriad of psychotherapy experiences that are specifically targeted towards the populations that they serve. Collaborations with the Division of Pediatric Neurology and the Division of Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics round out our breadth of educational experiences for our interdisciplinary learners. 

The UCSD Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Rady Children's Hospital of San Diego are also home to many successful research scientists, programs and endeavors. The Child and Adolescent Services Research Center (CASRC) is sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and our CASRC faculty are the beneficiaries of RO1 and K Awards (Career Scientist Development) from the NIMH. The Rady Children's Hospital Institute for Genomic Medicine is home to one of the largest data sets in pediatric genetics research, and also home to some of our division's up and coming researchers. Our full-time faculty has grown significantly over the past few years, all of whom are actively committed to teaching, research, and clinical services. Thus, scholarship and training in scholarship are thriving and an essential and core component to our division, both now and in years to come. 

While our clinical, educational, and research programs are the backbone of our division, our partnerships in the community are what give us a sense of collaboration, greater impact, and being connected to something greater than our individual selves. These partnerships include community-based substance use programming, autism and school-based services, forensic offerings, collaborative care with non-profit sector primary care and pediatrics, psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, and psychotherapy.

There is an atmosphere of compassion, empathy, passion, generativity and enthusiasm in our program! We welcome our new Fellows, as well as trainees in all related disciplines, to join us in our endeavors to ensure that this exceptional academic, clinical, and research program continues to make a difference in the hearts of our patients and community.

Thank you, and welcome to our division!