Antidepressant discontinuation, burnout, stress and resilience

Christiaan Vinkers is Full Professor "Stress and Resilience in Psychiatry" at the Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands. As a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, his overall research objective is to investigate the neurobiological background of stress resilience and vulnerability including (epi)genetic, neuroendocrine, and brain circuitry factors. He has obtained degrees in Pharmacy, Medicine and Law. His preclinical research (PhD training) concerned the genetic and molecular basis of stress reactivity using pharmacological, genetic and molecular techniques. It is his drive is to look for solutions in both fundamental preclinical and applied clinical research and promote the exchange of ideas between those two research approaches. In daily practice, he diagnoses and treats patients with psychiatric disorders (depression and anxiety disorders) which directly links his research activities to a clinical setting. He is co-founder of The Young Psychiatrist, the Dutch Stress Consortium STRESS-NL, the STRESS-EU database (www.stressdatabase.eu), chair of the ECNP Network Resilience, and initiator of a platform to inform the Dutch public on psychotropic drugs.

Silvia is a PhD student at the neurobiology research unit, Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet, Denmark. She is part of the Serotonin and Beyond European consortium and as part of her PhD she did an internship in science communication at ECNP. Her research primarily focuses on genetic and epigenetic markers of depression and antidepressant treatment, with a main focus on the serotonin system.