Department of General Psychiatry
Mental health care and research according to a holistic concept
In mental health care and research we are committed to a holistic concept of illness, which means the continuous consideration of the close interactions between biological and psychosocial conditions in the etiology course and therapy of mental illness. This requires careful diagnostics for our patients, which, in addition to the precice collection of complaints and disease development, provides the variety of psychological and neuropsychological test procedures as well as all options for modern imaging and neurophysiology. A holistic medical approach includes both biological-drug and psychotherapeutic treatment methods and is oriented at the wishes of the individual patient and his/her experieces with the disease.
The Department of General Psychiatry is part of the Heidelberg University Hospital and is located in the so-called Old University Hospital centrally in Heidelberg near Bismarckplatz. On eight disorder-specific wards, treatment is provide for patients with depressive and bipolar disorders, all forms of psychotic disorders, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, personality disorders, memory disorders and addictions. We have a center for early detection of mental disorders and treatment of adolescents together with the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, a mother-child ward for mentally ill pregnant women and mothers after child birth, a memory clinic, day clinics for medium and long-term rehabilitative therapy as well as affective disorders as well as various disorder-specific outpatient services.
We see psychiatry as a medical bridge between humanities and natural sciences. The department`s translational research focus aims to identify psychobiological mechanisms underlying mental disorders and to develop individualized treatments using methods of phenomenology, experimental psychopathology and pychotherapy research as well as neuroscience, especially structural and functional imaging as well as psycho-and neurophysiology.
