Erkki Isometsä, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Helsinki since 2004. He started his research career in the National Suicide Prevention Project in the late 1980s. Since then, he has worked on numerous studies of unipolar and bipolar mood disorders and suicidal behaviour. His research has focused on the clinical epidemiology of mood disorders, their risk factors, illness mechanisms, course, outcome, treatment, and associated disability and suicidal behaviour. His current research includes also randomized clinical studies of pharmaco- and psychotherapy of depression and suicidal behaviour, studies of neurocognition and emotional processing, and experience sampling and digital phenotyping of mood disorders and suicidal behaviour.
In the first phase of his research career in the 1990s, he acted as a senior researcher in the National Suicide Prevention Project, the WHO/Euro Study of Parasuicide Helsinki site, and the Finnish Health Care Survey. He also acted as a subgroup leader in the Finnish Health 2000 Survey. In the second phase, as the Head of the Mood Disorders and Suicide Research Unit at the National Public Health Institute, he led several major longitudinal research projects. These included the Vantaa Depression Study (VDS), the Vantaa Primary Care Depression Study (PC-VDS), the Jorvi Bipolar Study (JoBS), the Mood Disorder Molecular Genetics, Neuropsychology & Psychobiology project (Co-principal investigator of Molecular Genetics Professor Tiina Paunio).
After moving to the university position he initiated the Helsinki University Psychiatric Consortium (HUPC). Other recent work includes RCTs of add-on group behavioural activation treatment for depression in psychiatric care, group format schema therapy for borderline personality disorder, and the brief ASSIP intervention for preventing repetition of suicide attempts (in collaboration with the Finnish Mental Health Association). His current major ongoing research includes the experimental the STRIDE- Sequence Towards Recovery in Depression and BiBoDep-projects (Co-PI Professor Jesper Ekelund), and the Mobile Monitoring of Mood (MoM0-Mood) Consortium. He is also active senior researcher in register-based national studies of suicide and mental disorders.
Professor Isometsä is the Chair of the Finnish Task Force for Current Care Guidelines for Depression, a member of the national Suicide Prevention and Treatment of Suicide Attempters, plus Bipolar Disorder Guideline task forces, and President of The Finnish Psychiatric Association in 2020-21. He has had numerous positions in international scientific organizations, including the International Academy of Suicide Research (IASR), the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP), the International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD), and the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP); memberships in editorial boards of scientific journals, and other national and international expert roles. By 6th August 2024, he had authored or co-authored 287 published original studies, plus 173 reviews, textbook chapters, or editorials. According to the Web of Science (all databases), his publications have been cited 16,857 times (h-index 68). He has supervised 24 completed PhD theses, 10 of which have been granted the Finnish Psychiatric Association’s Martti Kaila Award for best psychiatric dissertation of the year in Finland. In 2014, he was awarded the Nordic Prize in Medicine.