NIMH to Sponsor Research Track

One highlight of the APA's annual meeting will again be a research track—a series of symposia and lectures—sponsored by one of the three mental health divisions of the National Institutes of Health. This year's track is being presented by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Credit: David Hathcox

According to Joyce Chung, M.D., deputy clinical director in the NIMH Office of the Clinical Director, a key focus of the research track is to make clinicians, educators, and training directors aware of new research that may be vital to their work.

NIMH last organized this kind of research track in 2008, when APA met in Washington, D.C. (In the intervening years, the tracks were presented by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.)

The sessions planned for this year's meeting in Honolulu (May 14 to 18) are carefully scheduled so that they do not compete with each other or overlap in subject matter, thus ensuring that registrants will be able to attend all parts of the NIMH track.

Chung discussed with Psychiatric News several presentations that are likely to be of special interest to annual meeting attendees. Among those are the following:

• A lecture by NIMH Director Thomas Insel, M.D., titled "Re-thinking Mental Illness."

• The symposium "Mental Health Care Reform and Mental Health Care Financing."

• The symposium "New Perspectives on Global Mental Health," which will have an emphasis on non-Western cultures.

• A lecture by David Lewis, M.D., titled "Translating Neurocircuits Into Novel Therapeutics for Schizophrenia."

• The symposium "Teaching What Every Psychiatrist Should Know About Neuroscience." Chung said this information will later be widely distributed as a resource for psychiatry residents' training, but will be released for the first time at this session.

• The symposium "Psychiatric Nosology: A Search for New Models," with special relevance to the development of DSM-5.

According to Chung, the four strategic objectives of NIMH as outlined in the institute's strategic plan and showcased in the presentations at the annual meeting are to

• promote discovery in the brain and behavioral sciences of the causes of mental disorders;

• chart mental illness trajectories to determine when, where, and how to intervene, with the intention of catching problems earlier;

• develop new and better interventions and treatments that incorporate the diverse needs and circumstances of people with mental illnesses; and

• strengthen the public health impact of NIMH-supported research.