Professor Jayashri Kulkarni and her team at Monash have been investigating schizophrenia and the hormone estrogen for a very long time. As long ago as 1996, her group showed that a type of estrogen called estradiol – as medicine – helped women with schizophrenia better than antipsychotics. The HER Centre is also conducting the first clinical trial to further investigate SERMs’ potential as a treatment for schizophrenia in both women and men. It uses the positive effects of estrogen, such as improving emotional symptoms