Thea J. Heeren was born in 1955 and studied medicine at the University of Leiden. She completed her training in psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry of the Leiden Academic Hospital in 1985. While working there as a psychiatrist with a special interest in old age psychiatry, she carried out the psychiatric part of a community-based study of the morbidity in the oldest old, initiated by the Section of Gerontology of Leiden University. In 1991 she finished her thesis on this subject and the results were published in several international journals.
Since 1986 she has been a member of the board of the Section of Old Age Psychiatry of the Dutch Association of Psychiatry, and its chairman between 1996 and 2000. She was a member of the organizing committee of the regional IPA meeting in Amsterdam in 1994. In addition to her membership in IPA, she is a member of the British Geriatrics Society and the European Association of Geriatric Psychiatry. She was elected to IPA’s Board of Directors in 1997.
Dr. Heeren became only the second professor of old age psychiatry in the Netherlands in 1993, upon assuming the (new) chair in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Utrecht. Her main research interests have changed from the field of epidemiology to the study of age-related changes in the brain (as measured by MRI) and their relationship to the psychopathology of late life especially late-life mood disorders and the study of the treatment of (resistant) late life depressive illness. Evaluation of mental health care programs for the elderly in primary care, nursing homes and residential homes for the elderly is a further line of investigation.
In line with her position as medical director of the Department of Old Age psychiatry of the regional general psychiatric hospital, she is actively involved in the planning and development of comprehensive psychiatric services for the elderly. Dr Heeren is the IPA Bulletin’s assistant editor for the Netherlands. She has served on IPA’s Board of Directors since 1997, and is currently Treasurer.
Thea J. Heeren was born in 1955 and studied medicine at the University of Leiden. She completed her training in psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry of the Leiden Academic Hospital in 1985. While working there as a psychiatrist with a special interest in old age psychiatry, she carried out the psychiatric part of a community-based study of the morbidity in the oldest old, initiated by the Section of Gerontology of Leiden University. In 1991 she finished her thesis on this subject and the results were published in several international journals.