The National Advisory Mental Health Council (NAMHC) meets several times each year to advise the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Secretary of Health and Human Services on all activities, policies, and programs relating to the conduct and support of mental health research and research training of the Institute. The NAMHC includes several experts from the FABBS community including Drs. Rinad Beidas, Northwestern University, Velma McBride Murry, Vanderbilt University, and Matthew Nock, Harvard University.
Dr. Josh Gordon began the meeting with his NIMH Director’s report with a few key updates highlighted below:
- Congressional interaction – Members of Congress in the House and Senate have reached out to NIMH on a range of topics and asking tough questions from the impact of social media and technology use on children, preteens, and teens to supporting people with Autism.
- Appropriations and budget updates – NIMH is still awaiting a final budget for fiscal year 2024 – which started on October 1, 2023. Due to the uncertainty, NIMH must plan for a broad range of possible budget outcomes and be conservative with awards until they have a final number.
- NIH News to Know – NIMH is celebrating it’s 75th anniversary this year with special events, videos, podcasts and featured stories that highlight NIMH’s research and impact on mental health. The next hybrid event – Amplifying Voices and Building Bridges: Towards a More Inclusive Future – will take place on March 18 at the National Archives Building.
ARPA-H
Council members heard from Dr. Susan Monarez, Deputy Director of the new federal agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Health (ARPA-H). Dr. Monarez, who spoke at the FABBS 2022 Council meeting, provided an overview of ARPA-H, noting that the past 18 months have been busy in getting the organization up and running to invest in high risk, high reward projects across the health ecosystem – from molecular to societal. Dr. Monarez described efforts to ‘find the ARPA-H sweet spot’ to best compliment NIH and build on our understanding of patient and provider needs to identify gaps and to potentially step in to fund what NIH cannot fund to accelerate translation to better health outcomes.
NAMHC members had questions about the relationship between NIH and ARPA-H. Dr. Monarez clarified that NIH and ARPA-H are two separate entities, with both Directors reporting to the Secretary. She emphasized their active collaboration – the ARPA-H Director attends many of the NIH leadership meetings and ARPA-H seeks input and learns from the experiences of NIH.
Dr. Monarez offered that ARPA-H is eager to have a program manager in mental health or behavioral health. While they have received a few proposals, they have yet to find one that fits the APRA-H model. This is a priority for ARPA-H and FABBS has been actively reaching out to our member scientists to inform them of this important opportunity.
Dr. Rinad asked about the inclusion of implementation science stressing the importance of incorporating key questions from the conception of programs and all the way through to scaling. Dr. Monarez acknowledged that while ARPA-H has an awareness of the importance, they do not yet have an investment portfolio focused on implementation science. FABBS has been in ongoing conversations with ARPA-H colleagues about how to build behavioral and social science questions into the vetting and program development process. Mr. Craig Gravitz, JD, Director of the Project Accelerator Transition Innovation Office and Dr. Jennifer Roberts, Director of the Resilient Systems, spoke at the FABBS 2023 Council meeting.
[Read “ARPA-H Launches HEROES Program“]
FABBS is a founding co-chair of the Friends of NIMH, a coalition dedicated to supporting the mission of the institute to transform the understanding of mental health and the treatment of mental illnesses through basic biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research, to best inform prevention, early intervention, recovery, and cures.
This newest program will be of particular interest to FABBS members as it aims to implement behavioral interventions on a large scale. ARPA-H is currently soliciting input on the HEROES program.
[Submit a HEROES Letter of Interest] | [See more information on the HEROES website]
