Christina Warner, MD (she/her) is the attending psychiatrist for the Early Psychosis Clinic and Partial Hospitalization Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She has clinical expertise in mood disorders, psychosis spectrum disorders, First Episode Psychosis, chronic suicidality, mood dysregulation, neurodiversity, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
Dr. Warner is a Washington native and graduate of the Seattle Public School system with a vested interest in expanding access to high quality mental health care in her community.
I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist committed to improving outcomes for young people who face complex difficulties and systemic barriers. As a clinician, I aim to establish meaningful therapeutic relationships with young people and those supporting them, while also working to advocate for public policy and health systems that improve access to quality mental healthcare.
My main role includes providing inpatient care to older adolescents at the Child Study and Treatment Center through the Behavioral Health Administration, Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, and acting as training lead for psychiatry at this site. My clinical interests include the transition from adolescence to adulthood, the emergence of mood disorder and psychosis, early intervention for personality disorder, and developmental disabilities. I have academic interest in medical education, health service development, and the social determinants of mental health.
I am currently the Medical Director at the Garvey Institute Center for Neuromodulation and am providing leadership to help grow our portfolio in the area of Neuromodulation and Interventional Psychiatry. Before coming to the UW, I was the Muriel Harris Chair of Geriatric Psychiatry and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at UCLA. While at UCLA, I held many administrative, clinical and teaching leadership positions including serving as Medical Director of Inpatient Geriatric Psychiatry, Chief of Staff of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Founding Faculty of the UCLA Neuromodulation Division, Medical Director of the ECT and Interventional Psychiatry Program, among others.
I recently became Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of ECT and Related Therapies, the official publication of the International Society of ECT and Neurostimulation. My research projects have included investigating various neuromodulation and interventional therapies and developing novel educational programs and curricula. I have an abiding interest in mentoring and helping faculty at the start of their careers and a commitment to fostering the advancement of women and underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in academic medicine.
I am a consult psychiatrist and clinical instructor at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. I work with people undergoing active cancer care. I previously practiced in the VA outpatient mental health clinic with veterans with mood disorders, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic and serious mental illness. I recently worked as a consult psychiatrist with the Swedish Primary Care Clinics, address a wide variety of concerns in a collaborative behavioral health care setting. I enjoy being a part of medical education, both learning and teaching. However, patient care always comes first.
My clinical and research interests center around behavioral and psychological symptoms that present in neurodegenerative diseases, especially dementias. Though dementia is well-known to affect one’s memory and cognition, over 90% of people with dementia develop new neuropsychiatric symptoms – including apathy, dysphoria. anxiety, aggression, agitation, disinhibition, hallucinations, and delusions. Despite the ubiquity of these symptoms, very little is known about how they develop in dementia. My research interests are in understanding more about the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia beyond the well-studied changes associated with cognitive deficits.
Along with my research mentor Martin Darvas PhD (Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology), we employ numerous approaches to better understand these neuropsychiatric symptoms, including techniques involving transcriptomic analyses of human and mouse post-mortem tissue, development and implementation of biomarkers derived from human and animal model fluids (plasma, serum, cerebrospinal fluid), virally-mediated gene manipulations, animal modeling of cognitive and neuropsychiatric phenotypes, and basic cellular and molecular biology techniques.
I recently joined the faculty at UW and am the new program director for the general residency program. I am excited to be here! I have been working in graduate medical education and have been a program director for over 14 years. Although my major focus is graduate medical education, I am also passionate about patient safety, quality improvement, and healthcare risk management. Additionally, I have a background in basic research with expertise in virology, microbiology, and immunology.
I am a bilingual, bicultural psychiatrist with interests in cultural psychiatry, psychotherapy, trauma-informed care, and improving quality of care and safety for our patients/families that receive care in a language other than English and other underserved communities.
I joined the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry faculty at the University of Washington in Fall of 2022 after completing my Child and Adolescent Psychiatry training here at the University of Washington at Seattle Children’s Hospital and General Psychiatry SUNY Upstate Medical University, with emphasis in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Trauma Focused- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
