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Rechercher

Social Sciences and Humanities; Health Sciences

Suzanne King

Professeure associée

Faculté des arts et des sciences - Département de psychologie

suzanne.king@umontreal.ca

Secondary number: 514 761-6131 (Travail 1)

Profile

Research expertise

Suzanne King is a Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and has been a Lead Investigator in the Psychosocial Research Division at the Douglas Institute Research Centre since 1991. Her prior work on schizophrenia investigated the associations between the course of schizophrenia and family attitudes toward the patient (expressed emotions).

More recently, Project EnviroGen has been investigating the means by which risk factors for schizophrenia, including genetics, prenatal stress, obstetric complications, childhood trauma and teenage cannabis use, influence the appearance of symptoms among schizophrenic individuals and in "healthy" control populations. Using a local natural disaster to prospectively examine the effects of prenatal stress, Dr. King and her team followed over 150 women who had been pregnant during the 1998 ice storm and their children.

Project Icestorm showed that the severity of maternal stress and the trimester of the pregnancy at the time of exposure explain the variance in the children's cognitive, behavioural and physical development. The effects of exposure to prenatal maternal stress were still present among children at age 11 ½.

A second study on prenatal maternal stress, the Iowa Flood Study, attempted to replicate Project Icestorm by following 300 women who had experienced flooding in June 2008, including a cohort of women whose risk factors and psychosocial functioning had been assessed before the disaster, making this the first pre- and post-trauma study of pregnant women.

Lastly, the QF2011 Queensland Flood Study includes pre-flood psychosocial data, a randomized control group using two birth support practices by a midwife, and biological samples from the births collected from nearly 300 Australian women. Dr. King is attempting to integrate the findings of her prospective and retrospective studies in a neurodevelopmental model of severe mental illness.

Biography

Suzanne King est professeure en psychiatrie à l’Université McGill et chercheure principale à la Division de recherche psychosociale au Centre de recherche de l’Hôpital Douglas depuis 1991.

Affiliations and responsabilities

Projects

Research projects

2022 - 2024

Le stress objectif et subjectif de la femme enceinte suivant une catastrophes naturelle peut affecter son accouchement et augmenter le risque que son enfant développe des traits autistiques : urgence d'agir face aux changements climatiques

Funding sources: MITACS Inc.
Grant programs: PVXXXXXX-Stage Accélération Québec - MITACS

Outreach

Publications and presentations

Disciplines

  • Psychology
  • Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Areas of expertise

  • Child development
  • Schizophrenia
  • Role of stress
  • Complex post-traumatic stress
  • Teenager
  • Newborns, children and teenagers
  • Prematurity
  • Emotions
  • Affect regulation