Dr. William Beardslee directs the Baer Prevention Initiatives and is the Chairman Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Distinguished Gardner/Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Beardslee’s long standing research interest has centered on the development of children at risk because of parental adversities such as mental illness or poverty. His work is focused on the ways in which self and shared understanding help individuals and families cope with adversity.
Dr. Beardslee’s early work described civil rights workers and how they endured and significantly changed the South. He also studied resilience in survivors of cancer and in children of depressed parents. This led to the development of effective public health interventions for families facing depression and a ten-year randomized trial that showed they were safe and led to lasting gains. The work received high ratings in the National Registry of Effective Programs and this approach has been used as part of countrywide strategies in Finland, Holland, Costa Rica, and Australia. In this country, Dr. Beardslee and his colleagues adapted the principles in a teacher training and empowerment program for use in Head Start and Early Head Start called Family Connections. He directed the Boston site of a multisite study on the prevention of depression in adolescents using Greg Clarke’s cognitive-behavioral model. This work has demonstrated sustained preventive effects for more than 75 months after enrollment. He has been a member of numerous prevention projects and has mentored many young research scientists. He is the author of over 300 scientific articles and two books: The Way Out Must Lead In: Life Histories in the Civil Rights Movement and Out of the Darkened Room: When a Parent Is Depressed - Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family. He served on several Institute of Medicine committees whose reports include Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders Among Young People (2009) and recently, Parenting Matters: Supporting Parents of Children 0-8 (2016), and co-founded and for six years co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences’ Forum on Children’s Wellness.
Dr. Beardslee has received numerous awards, including the Blanche F. Ittleson Award of the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding published research contributing to the mental health of children, the Catcher in the Rye Award for Advocacy of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Human Rights Award from the Department of Mental Health of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Emory University and the Community, Culture, and Prevention Science Award from the Society for Prevention Research. In 2012, he was awarded the Judge Baker Children's Center World of Children Award. In 2014, he received the Gerald L. Kleman Senior Investigator Award from the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance and, in 2020, the Distinguished Contribution to Child Advocacy from the American Psychological Association. In 2024, Children’s Hospital Boston gave him a 50-Year Service Recognition Award.