Speaker Biography

He trained under Manfred Bleuler and was Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Head of the Research Department of Zurich University Psychiatric Hospital (the Burghölzli) from 1969 to 1994. He continues to work full-time in epidemiological and clinical research.

His monograph (1966) established and validated the distinction between bipolar disorders, depression, and schizoaffective disorders on the basis of genetics, course, and personality. He was the first to show the unfavourable long-term course of mood disorders.

In 1964 he described the familial response to imipramine; on the basis of multicentre studies, he provided statistical evidence for the long-term efficacy of lithium (1970) and for the efficacy of clozapine (1971). His more recent work in psychopharmacology has focused on the long-term prophylactic effect of antidepressants and atypical neuroleptics against suicide, on the early onset of action of antidepressants, and on "drug-induced hypomania".

His recent main research has been in epidemiology covering the classification, comorbidity and course of mood and anxiety disorders including subdiagnostic syndromes (recurrent brief depression, bipolar-II disorders, hypomania, minor bipolar disorder, and anxiety), OCD, neurasthenia, perimenstrual syndromes and migraine.

He has also studied the relationship of personality with birth order, astrology, blood groups, smoking, drug abuse, suicide, mood disorders, and schizophrenia.

He has received many awards in recognition of his work, including the Anna Monika Awards (1967/1969), Paul Martini Prize for Methodology in Medicine (1969), Otto Naegeli Prize (1983), Eric Strömgren Medal (1987), and the Emil Kraepelin Medal of the Max Planck Institute, Munich (1992). He has also received the Selo Prize NARSAD/Depression Research, USA (1994), Mogens Schou Award for Research in Bipolar Disorder, USA (2001), the Burghölzli Award for Social Psychiatry (2001), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics (2002), the Wagner-Jauregg Medal (2007), the Juan J. López-Ibor Award (2010) and the WFSBP Lifetime Achievement Award in Biological Psychiatry (2011).

Professor Angst is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is a Honorary member of the Mexican, Chilean, Polish, and Austrian Psychiatric Associations; the American Psychopathological Association; the German Association of Biological Psychiatrists, the Swiss Society of Psychiatric Epidemiology; the Swiss Society of Biological Psychiatry, the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the Association of European Psychiatrists, of which he was President from 1966 to 1998. In 2002 he was elected as a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.