Recognized among the world’s leading medical institutions and ranked among Newsweek’s World’s Best Hospitals, Sheba Medical Center combines clinical excellence with research that advances patient care. At the Chava Center for Reproductive Psychiatry, this commitment is reflected in efforts to better understand, identify, and treat psychiatric conditions that can emerge during pregnancy and after childbirth.
A Sheba-led study in World Psychiatry, one of the most prestigious journals in the field, found that pre-trauma alcohol use was linked to worse mental health outcomes in survivors of acute trauma. These included more dissociation, anxiety, depression, and acute stress symptoms, while use of other substances did not show the same effect.
Prof. Joseph Zohar, former Director of Sheba’s Division of Psychiatry, active researcher and professor of psychiatry at Tel Aviv University, is the only Israeli to have served as president of a major international psychiatric organization. He has spent his career shaping not just how psychiatric patients are treated, but how the entire field defines and updates its own standards. Two international initiatives he has helped lead now stand to change psychiatric prescribing worldwide.
A study co-authored by Sheba Medical Center’s Dr. Vered Bar, Head of the Chava Center Reproductive Psychiatry Unit, in collaboration with researchers from the KI Research Institute in Kfar Malal, Israel, and Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, tested whether a machine learning model could predict a woman’s risk of postpartum depression, in some cases before she is even pregnant. Layered onto standard screening, the model was found to meaningfully sharpen detection accuracy.
At Sheba Psychiatry, quality is measured across critical points in the patient journey, from treatment planning and family involvement to discharge and continuity of care. National quality indicators defined by Israel’s Ministry of Health provide measurable benchmarks for evaluating performance, while Sheba’s own internal quality measures track additional aspects of care coordination and family communication.
A multicenter pilot study co-authored by researchers from Sheba Medical Center, ranked by Newsweek as the #7 Best Hospital in the World, has produced strong clinical evidence for the efficacy of neurofeedback in addressing one of depression’s most treatment-resistant symptoms: anhedonia.
