About Us

Women have a greater lifetime risk for depression than men

The UC San Diego Department of Psychiatry, under lead investigator Barbara L. Parry, MD, is conducting several research studies to evaluate treatment options for women experiencing mood, sleep or behavioral disturbances induced by changing reproductive hormones. With a focus on mood disorders throughout the reproductive cycle, we study alternative treatments to medication, including sleep and light therapies, for pregnancy, postpartum, PMS and menopausal depression.

Barbara L. Parry, M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where she has served as Director of the Women's Mood Disorders Clinic of the UCSD Outpatient Psychiatric Services, Director of the Women's Mental Health Clinic at the San Diego Veterans Administration Healthcare Center and Associate Director of the Medical Student Clerkship in Psychiatry. Before joining the faculty at UCSD in 1985, she did a research fellowship in Clinical Psychobiology at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She completed a residency in Psychiatry and an internship in Internal Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her clinical research focus is the chronobiology of mood disorders specific to women: premenstrual, pregnancy/postpartum and menopausal depression. She conducts sleep, light, melatonin and other hormonal studies with the aim of developing non-pharmacological approaches to treatment. Her work is supported by NIH funding, she has authored or co-authored over 285 publications and served on NIH study sections, Data and Safety Monitoring Boards and the editorial boards of the American Journal of Psychiatry, the Journal of Biological Rhythms, the International Journal of Endocrinology and Equilibria, and the Journal for Postpartum Psychiatric Illness Research.