I agree with
@tr in increasing NIH budget. I also want to push budget from imaging over to novel agents. I.e. why have we funded thousands of R01s for meaningless, small N fmri studies when the best research out there shows fmri is almost meaningless unless you deep phenotype a single N (longer scan times, over multiple times) or have N approaching several thousand. No brain imaging is producing clinical improvement outside of a single tms proof of concept protocol. Over half of the “top” papers come down to unfounded statistical inferences based off a misunderstandings of what the data is saying. It’s like giving a toddler access to a ford F150 on a highway, they don’t even know how much damage they are doing to science.
Meanwhile, a novel mechanism like brexanolone or other brain penetrating steroids are barely used or researched when thousands of these agents may be critical for future psychiatry (and already have indications). Instead, pharma is forced to fund useless research to prove a novel combo is FDA cleared so they are allowed to market to left handed people with type 2 bipolar and left foot right foot stomp disorder . Who gives a flying $&@$ about another carbon copy antipsychotic. It’s all just marketing and nothing has edged out other compounds.
The way academia, industry, and government interfaces currently is deeply frustrating and profoundly wasteful. I have colleagues at a top department who’s whole careers have been meaningless for society, cranking junk science, and showing once again that rat eats pellet if we delete SNP x47zy2. Who cares? Get a real job. SNPs and voxel by voxel brain imaging has not and will not be the path forward for psychiatry. Accept it and move on. Find real science by real thinkers. Instead we just publish pretty brain photos in top journals and think we’re doing science. We are not, and it’s a joke.
