From Lab to Life: How Personalized Treatment Could Transform Care for Major Depression and Eating Disorders

By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences 

Irina Vanzhula’s research on creating personalized treatment for Major Depressive Disorder could have far reaching impacts in the field of psychology as she advocates and develops more effective methods to serve an individual’s needs. 

“We're working in our lab primarily on a personalized treatment for eating disorders, but really the technique and the protocol that we're developing can be applied to any psychological condition,” Vanzhula said. "This new method that we're developing for personalization of treatment can apply to virtually anything: anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and so on. This is just one example of how we're taking the method we've developed and bringing it into a field of depression.” 

A clinical psychologist and Assistant Research Professor at the University of Louisville, now supported by a Jesse Wright Research Endowment grant, Vanzhula is exploring ways to improve outcomes by tailoring therapy to individual patient needs, recognizing that standard treatments don’t work for everyone.  

Through her role in the Eating Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab, she also studies how anxiety, depression, and eating behaviors overlap, aiming to create more precise and effective interventions. As a Presidential Research Scholar at the Louisville Clinical & Translational Research Center, her research contributes to UofL’s growing leadership in innovative, patient-centered, evidence-based approaches to mental health care. 

“There are lots of treatments for depression out there, but less than half of the people actually respond to therapy and only about a third get better,” she states. “One idea is that this is due to the fact that depression is very heterogeneous. The DSM criteria lists 227 different ways that a person can meet criteria for depression.” 

This means that two people can have absolutely no common symptoms and can both be diagnosed with depression. One person might have difficulty sleeping, have low appetite and feel very restless, while another might also have depression, but could be sleeping all of the time.  

“The idea is that right now, we're using these one-size-fits-all psychotherapies, and so, they're effective for some people, but they're not really effective for everybody,” Vanzhula states. “This results in clinicians using some guesswork to decide how we adapt these existing treatments.” 

Increasing the effectiveness of therapists and their ability to treat their patients is the goal of this research. 

“What we're doing with our research is we're trying to take away that guesswork and use some of the more data-driven approach to try to figure out: how do we put together someone's treatment, so it is more personalized?” 

In order to accomplish this, Vanzhula has patients fill out surveys on their phone for two weeks, twice a day, and then a personalized symptom profile is created for the individual. For somebody who may be sleeping a lot, it could also make their appetite greater, and then when they eat, they might then feel guilty about eating. 

This new methodology helps therapists to answer this question: how do all of these symptoms interact together?  

“Instead of just saying ‘You have depression, here's the treatment,’ we're identifying what someone's depression actually looks like. And then we match evidence-based interventions to those symptoms specifically. So, intervention looks a little bit more like series of building blocks instead of just the same thing for everybody,” she said. 

In these personalized treatments, researchers are also considering the additional contextual factors that could be making someone’s depression worse. For example, if a patient is highly perfectionistic and they constantly feel bad for not getting things on their list done, these factors could be making them more depressed.  

"That should be considered in their treatment,” Vanzhula said. 

Vanzhula’s Presidential Scholar project focuses on developing personalized mealtime interventions for eating disorders. She is drawing insights from her work around depression, which has been especially strong in identifying transdiagnostic factors—such as interpersonal relationship problems—that influence mental health outcomes. By integrating these broader perspectives, she aims to better understand how such factors contribute to the maintenance of eating disorders. This approach not only deepens her research but also makes it more interdisciplinary, bridging lessons across fields to create more effective treatments with broad impact. 

“There are a lot of similarities across diagnoses,” Vanzhula states. “They're not actually as categorical as we sometimes think, and so similarly, being in the depression field helps me bring more knowledge to the eating disorder world, and vice versa.”  

Vanzhula shared how meaningful it is to see the growth of UofL’s research programs, especially in mental health. Having earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at UofL, she describes the university as “home.” She values the recognition she has received and is enthusiastic about helping UofL continue to grow as a nationally recognized research institution. 

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