Meet Dr. Freedman
Leading Prenatal Mental Health Researcher
Robert Freedman, MD, is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and trained at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Chicago. For the past 45 yeas, he has been a faculty member at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, where he is Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, and former Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Chief of Service, at University of Colorado Hospital. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and served as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry and on the Editorial Board of the New England Journal of Medicine. He received the Merit Award of the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Research Award of the American Psychiatric Association.
Dr. Freedman co-founded the Institute for Children’s Mental Health in 1999. Institute investigators under his direction discovered genetic variants that affect the risks for serious mental disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, attention deficit disorder, and bipolar disorder. Their investigations led to a new nutritional treatment, prenatal maternal choline, now shown in FDA-approved trials to prevent abnormalities in early brain development that lead to these mental disorders later in life. This work was awarded “breakthrough” designation in 2020 by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, as the first study to demonstrate promise for the prenatal prevention of mental illness.
Dr. Freedman is the author of The Madness Within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process (Oxford University Press, 2009). In addition, he participated in the treatment of the Galvin family who had six sons with schizophrenia. A book about the family, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker (Doubleday, 2020) was a New York Times top 10 book for 2020, an Oprah Winfrey Book Club 2020 choice, and one of Barrack Obama’s top 12 books for 2020. The family participated in genetic research conducted by Dr. Freedman that led to identification of a prenatal role for choline, which ultimately became the focus of his current research and advocacy.
The Brain and Behavior Research Foundation recently featured Dr. Freedman's work on choline in their PBS series, Healthy Minds with Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein. The National Institutes of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research featured his work on the benefits of prenatal choline supplements for the outcome of pregnancies of Black women in its Research Spotlights. Dr. Freedman's research on how a mother's mental health can impact her unborn child's future mental health, was recently featured in Smithsonian Magazine.
Schizophrenia is one of the most devastating and mysterious mental illnesses. People with schizophrenia have the unique sensation that their brain is being taken over by external entities and that their heads are filled with voices that are not their own. Although it is increasingly recognized as a biological illness of the brain, it also has profound psychological implications for how we perceive reality.
The Madness Within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process is an illuminating discussion of these two aspects of the illness. Dr. Robert Freedman, who is both a neuroscientist and a practicing clinical psychiatrist, outlines the emerging understanding of shizophrenia as a neurobiological illness and shows how these new insights can be used as a bridge to the psychological understanding of the delusions and hallucinations. He combines the findings of modern brain science with insights from the clinical practitioner's empathic listening to patients as they describe their problems.
Dr. Freedman's Book