Session Presenter - Dr. Karen Swartz

Karen L. Swartz, M.D. received her B.A. from Princeton University and her M.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  She completed her psychiatry residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she served as chief resident.  She is now an attending psychiatrist with clinical expertise in mood disorders and eating disorders who is the Director of Clinical Programs of the Mood Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins.  Along with Dr. Jennifer Payne, Karen founded the Women’s Mood Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins.  Karen is also the Associate Director for Residency Education and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Karen directs the Adolescent Depression Awareness Program (ADAP) a school-based program to educate high school students, faculty, and parents about teenage depression. ADAP was started in response to the suicide of 3 high school students in Baltimore.  Karen began speaking to high school students, their parents, and their teachers about depression being a common and treatable medical illness. Her other research had focused on psychiatric disorders in women and psychiatric disorders in the general population, including the study of whether affective disorders predict migraine headaches, the incidence of social phobias in the Baltimore area, and the heterogeneity and course of affective disorders.  Dr. Swartz has written articles for such journals as Archives of General Psychiatry, Current Opinion in Psychiatry, the International Review of Psychiatry, and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

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