Balancing Immediate Needs with Future Innovation NIMH Director’s Blog by Thomas Insel January 26, 2012 NIMH, like all Institutes at NIH, has an advisory council that meets three times each year. The National Advisory Mental Health Council [NAMHC] is a distinguished group of scientists, advocates, clinicians, and policy experts. Each of our meetings includes a […]
When I read population statistics like the suicide figures in the last post [what’s missing…], I don’t exactly know what to do with them, what to take away that might help in my own work. Ned Shorter points us to one thing – the dramatic increases in suicides in teenaged girls [Teen Suicide: Parents Guard […]
this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper T.S.Eliot 1922 Dr. Tom Insel to Step Down as NIMH Director … A national search for a new NIMH Director will be launched, but in the meanwhile […]
I should’ve just let things lie with my last post – stuck with my bit of sarcasm and moved on. Instead, I clicked on the link that lead to Fusion‘s interview of Dr. Insel, and it wound me up all over again. I’ve characterized Dr. Insel as a breakthrough·freak…– moving from one shiny object to […]
Tom Insel came to the NIMH at the height of the rise of neuroscience. It was a new century. The future DSM-5 team was just setting its sights on finally adding the hard science fixings to the psychiatrized brain. The drugs were steadily pouring from the pharmaceutical pipeline and were hitting the top of the […]
Strategic Plan: Director’s Message NIMH by Tom Insel 03/26/2015 … This update of our Strategic Plan is a commitment to take a fresh look at our horizons so that we can refine priorities and energize our path of discovery. We know that some scientists reject the concept of “directed science,” believing that science rarely follows […]
Director’s Blog: Mapping the Risk Architecture of Mental Disorders NIMH By Thomas Insel July 22, 2014 It’s difficult to overstate the impact that genomic medicine is having on biomedical research and practice. For cancer diagnostics, rare disease therapeutics, and fields like microbiomics and infectious diseases, the advent of cheap, fast, precise genomic sequencing has been […]
Psycritic wrote a post in response to my on the wrong side of the equation… where I was making an analogy between dress designers having to constantly generate new products to keep the game going and some of our psychiatric KOLs who seem lost without something new from the psychopharmacologic pipeline. He had another take […]
In the same old banners…, I was talking about two markers in psychiatry at the dawn of this new century that I didn’t understand. After psychiatry announced in 1980 that it was off and running to find some kind of biomedical legitimacy, there were twenty years of preoccupation with neurotransmitters and the medications that altered […]
A Decade of Perspective NIMH Director’s Blog By Thomas Insel November 05, 2012 In another week or so, I will have been director of NIMH for ten years. This is longer than any previous director dating back to the inaugural director, Bob Felix, who served from 1949 to1964. In leadership, longevity is not necessarily a […]