Dr Jacob Crouse is a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the University of Sydney's Brain and Mind Centre. He has a major interest in the potential role of sleep and circadian dysregulation in the etiology and course of youth-onset depressive and bipolar disorders. Jacob is leading an international Delphi study to identify the essential information about chronobiology and chronotherapy that clinicians should know to optimise their care of people with bipolar disorders. Jacob was awarded a Circadian Mental Health Network Early Career Research Award to support attending an international conference. Below, we hear about his activities.
With help from an ECR award from the Circadian Mental Health Network, I was able to travel recently to the 2024 International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD) conference in Reykjavik, Iceland.
This award was primarily to fund the conference attendance/networking, and secondarily, to help disseminate the findings of a Delphi study on the chronobiology and chronotherapy of bipolar disorder (more on that later).
I arrived in Reykjavik two days early, to attend a harbour cruise and dinner, followed by a full-day workshop with a working group on Early Intervention in Bipolar Disorder. Put on by the Daymark Foundation, this year’s meeting in Reykjavik was a follow-up to a meeting last year in Lausanne, Switzerland (www.orygen.org.au/Training/Resources/Bipolar-Disorder/Discussion-paper). The aim of this year’s workshop (attended by researchers, clinicians, and people with lived experience of bipolar disorder) was to sketch what might become a Global Alliance on Early Intervention in Bipolar Disorder. Being invited to the meeting this year and last year have been important career milestones.
The ISBD conference was held at a terrific venue by the water, Harpa.
The conference itself was a packed three days! On the first night, I presented a poster on a study of the Australian Genetics of Depression Study (https://www.geneticsofdepression.org.au/), where we showed important inter-relationships among genetic risks and exposure to stressful life events in people ~14,000 with depression (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02492-x).
On the second day, I gave a talk about a new paper—also on the Australian Genetics of Depression Study—where we showed that evening chronotypes report that SSRIs don’t work as well for their depression, compared to morning types (https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(24)00002-7/fulltext). It was important to share what we think is a clinically useful finding. That night I was able to check out four posters from my team from Sydney (led by Mirim Shin, Emiliana Tonini, Elizabeth Scott, and Ian Hickie). The findings of one of these posters was just published, looking at how (and potentially why) the sleep patterns of people with depression changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, led by Mirim Shin (https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e301067.full).
On the third day, I gave another talk in a symposium alongside a long-time collaborator of my team, Kathleen Merikangas, as well as a new collaborator, Laura Palagini (the symposium being chaired by Ian Hickie). My talk focused on the findings of a new Delphi study that I led with John Gottlieb on behalf of the ISBD Chronobiology and Chronotherapy Task Force. The aim of this study was to identify what information about the chronobiology and chronotherapy of BD is important for clinicians to know about. This is a critical question given the evidence that this information is poorly communicated to clinicians. It was a treat to present these findings for the first time to a number of my collaborators on the ISBD task force (several of whom were also expert participants in the Delphi study). As alluded to earlier, the second part of my ECR award from the Circadian Mental Health Network will be to develop an online resource to summarise the information for clinicians that the Delphi study generated. We hope to publish our findings in the first half of 2025 and will be working on dissemination strategies in the meantime. On the last day of the conference, in the very last slot, I chaired a session on genetics (my first time chairing at a conference).
I’m also a member of the ISBD Early Mid-Career Committee (EMCC) and was very happy to be able to catch up with the EMCC over dinner, attend and help out with a few events (e.g., a workshop on grant writing, a speed networking section), and meet with the committee to discuss our next plans. I was also very happy to have a meeting and a dinner with the ISBD Task Force on Chronobiology and Chronotherapy, many of whom I’d interacted with online, but never in person. All in all, a great deal of networking and research sharing got done on this trip.
Finally, I also had a lovely few days travelling around Iceland with some of my teammates. We got to see a bunch of incredible waterfalls and some otherworldly landscapes (including the crater of a meteor). Sadly, I couldn’t catch the Northern lights but will make sure to be back to try again!
Huge thanks to the Circadian Mental Health Network for funding a productive and valuable trip!
Blog by Jacob Crouse
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