Prof. Haim Belmaker
Private psychiatry treatment including medication, psychotherapy, couples, families and sexology. Certified Israel and USA.
He has received the Anna Monika Prize for Research in Depression (1983), the Ziskind-Somerfeld Prize for Senior Research in Psychiatry (1993) and the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Lilly Research Award (1996), and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Lifetime Achievement Falcone Award for research in affective disorder (2000) and the Research Prize of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (2004). He was President of the CINP 2008-2010 (International College of Neuropsychopharmacology) and Vice President of the International Society for Bipolar Disorder 2012-14.
In 2013-2018 he has been President of the INA (International Neuropsychiatric Association) and in 2015-2018 President of the Israel Psychiatric Association (IPA).
Dr. Belmaker received his BA from Harvard College in 1967 and his MD from Duke Medical School in 1971. From 1972-74 he was a Clinical Associate at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD. Since 1974 he has held positions in academic psychiatry in Israel, first at the Jerusalem Mental Health Center 1974-1984 and then at Ben Gurion University of the Negev 1985 to the present.
Dr. Belmaker was a pioneer in biological psychiatry in Israel, and chaired the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP) meeting in Jerusalem in 1982. His research interests include affective disorders, especially mania, ECT, and second messenger mechanisms.
In 1993 he submitted a grant request to National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression proposing that TMS could be therapeutically useful in psychiatry, and was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Investigator Award to pursue this hypothesis.
Publicatons
Video Prof. Haim Belmaker, MD – What is BiPolar Disorder
Crossing continents: changing ideas in bipolar disorder
An interview with Robert Haim Belmaker.
Robert Haim Belmaker has been Professor of Psychiatry at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, for the past 30 years. His career has seen the unfolding of the lithium story, and he has played roles therein both in the clinic and the laboratory.
Lithium was approved for clinical use in the treatment of mania in the US in 1970, having been first approved in some European countries in the early 1960s[1]. This of course was the era of the ‘psychopharmacological revolution’, which saw a number of drugs with psychiatric therapeutic effects coming into the clinic.
