Healio (10/20) reports that recently, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) “announced it will provide $21 million in funding over five years for a study on the development of mental disorders that develop following trauma.” In a press release, NIMH director Joshua A. Gordon, MD, PhD, said, “In the relatively short term, this project is expected to deliver tools for clinicians to make informed decisions about risk and follow-up care soon after trauma.”

Additionally, the “research resource to be created will fuel a new generation of analyses on the underlying causes of disorders, identify new intervention targets, and in turn give rise to mechanism-informed treatments based on individual needs.”

Related Links:

— “NIMH study will explore trauma-related mental illness,” Healio, October 20, 2016.

The Huffington Post (10/18, Almendrala) reports that researchers are developing a test to “predict how effective antidepressants will be.” Although “the test is still in early stages, a recent study…found that it was able to predict whether or not an antidepressant would restore a person’s symptoms to healthy levels with 81 percent accuracy.” The findings of the 102-patient study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Related Links:

— “Will Antidepressants Work For You? There Will Soon Be A Test For That,” Anna Almendrala, The Huffington Post, October 18, 2016.

HCP Live (10/18) reports that “childhood adversity appears to be associated with bipolar disorder,” researchers concluded. The 19-study review “found that people with bipolar disorder were 2.63 times…more likely to have suffered emotional, physical, or sexual abuse as children than counterparts in the general population.” The findings were published online the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “Bipolar Disorder Linked with Childhood Neglect and Abuse,” HCP Live, October 18, 2016.

In a 1,700-word article, The Atlantic (10/17, Goldberg) reports that “the majority of the nation’s youngest students don’t have access to mental-health resources at school.” Just “23 percent of prekindergarten programs have on-site or scheduled visits from psychiatrists or psychologists, according to the Child Mind Institute’s 2016 Children’s Mental Health Report.” Exacerbating the situation even further is “the current shortage of mental-health professionals, which is expected to continue.”

In fact, “the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration projects that 12,624 child and adolescent psychologists will be needed to meet demand by 2020, but a supply of only 8,312 is expected.” The article goes on to detail some new school-based programs designed to “make mental health a more robust part of the school day.”

Related Links:

— “The New Focus on Children’s Mental Health,” EMILY GOLDBERG, The Atlantic, October 17, 2016.

Philly (PA) (10/17, Burling) reports that on Oct. 17, the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) “said…hospital emergency departments routinely are clogged with patients who are waiting, sometimes for days, for inpatient psychiatric care.” The group “bolstered its case with data from a poll of more than 1,700 emergency physicians as well as research presented at its annual meeting this week in Las Vegas.” The situation is being blamed “on inadequate inpatient and outpatient resources for patients with serious mental illnesses.”

Related Links:

— “Emergency physicians say psych patients wait too long for care,” Stacey Burling, Philly.Com, October 18, 2016.