NIH announces 10 winners of the “Speaking Up About Mental Health! This Is My Story” national essay challenge, aimed at spurring conversations among youth about mental health and encouraging them to seek support for themselves and others.
Source: nimh

Franchesca Kuhney, Ph.D., winner of the 2018 NIMH Three-Minute Talks Competition, presents her three minute talk on hippocampus and amygdala volume across development in Willaims Syndrome. Her study begins to shed light on the complex neuro genetic mechanisms underlying adolescent brain development as a whole.
Source: nimh

Elisa Dumett Torres, Ph.D., winner of the 2018 NIMH Three-Minute Talks Competition, presents her three minute talk on viewing hippocampal functional coupling through the lens of environmental factor of urbanicity and the genetic factor BDNF. Her study provides a template for exploring the effects of gene environment interactions for general brain function and how this might be altered in psychiatric illness.
Source: nimh

Gene expression regulators work together to raise an individual’s risk of developing schizophrenia. Schizophrenia-like gene expression changes modeled in human neurons matched changes found in patients’ brains.
Source: nimh

NIMH awarded six research grants for studies to develop a learning health care system for the treatment of early psychosis.
Source: nimh

This concept seeks applications for projects to evaluate preliminary effectiveness of interventions targeting sustained and enhanced clinical response following acute treatment for anorexia nervosa (AN). In this pilot research phase, trials should be designed to evaluate the feasibility, tolerability, acceptability, safety, and target engagement, as well as potential effectiveness, with a deployment-focused approach to facilitate approaches that are scalable to community settings.
Source: nimh

This initiative seeks to develop task-based behavioral measures, which will be validated with neuroimaging and then used as behavioral readouts serving as a proxy for engagement of brain subsystems relevant to anhedonia.
Source: nimh

The goal of this initiative is to encourage studies that develop and test the effectiveness of strategies for implementation and sustainable delivery of evidence-based mental health practices (EBPs) in settings where limited capital and human resources create barriers to care delivery, in order to improve mental health outcomes for underserved populations and reduce or eliminate health disparities.
Source: nimh

: The goal of this initiative is to foster research collaborations between academic researchers and digital health tevhnology developers to test strategies to increase the reach, efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of digital mental health interventions.
Source: nimh

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. In observance, Dr. Gordon has partnered with Dr. Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), to highlight a dimension of the opioid crisis that receives too little attention—the links between opioid use, opioid use disorder, and suicide.
Source: nimh