AMERICAN academic and research psychiatry struggles to maintain and renew itself. Federal support for research, scientific training, and career development have been crucial elements in the growth and development of an unsurpassed and internationally respected scientific base in American psychiatry since the 1940s. A recent review of the past 50 years of development in American biological psychiatry strongly supports the need to encourage the efforts of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Rockville, Md, to secure and expand its support of scientific projects and career development and stability among academic psychiatrists.¹

After decades of highly productive growth and stimulation of psychiatric research activity through federal funding, support for psychiatric (as distinct from neuroscientific, behavioral, and social) research and training is not keeping up with public needs or research opportunities. In constant 1945 dollars, annual NIMH grants and their funding level reached an all-time peak in the early 1960s. Dollar totals barely kept pace with inflation from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s and increases thereafter, in constant dollars, have been modest, particularly when monies set aside for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome research or other special purposes are deducted. Support for research on major psychiatric disorders remains disproportionately low compared with that available for other medical illnesses, and is grossly disproportionate to the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the annual costs of disabling psychiatric disorders.^2,3