Director’s Messages

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. In observance, Dr. Gordon has partnered with Dr. Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), to highlight a dimension of the opioid crisis that receives too little attention—the links between opioid use, opioid use disorder, and suicide.

In his latest message, Dr. Gordon discusses the role of NIMH and other researchers in the development of esketamine, an FDA-approved, rapid-acting medication that targets treatment-resistant depression.

In this Director’s message, Dr. Gordon digs into the historical roots of the hippocampus and the role it plays in human memory – an example of how scientists build upon past research discoveries and, in turn, advance the science that could benefit future generations.

In this Director’s Message, Dr. Gordon discusses research-based advances in the understanding and treatment of depression.

April is Autism Awareness Month and in this Director’s message, Dr. Gordon discusses the past, present, and future of autism research.

In this message, Dr. Gordon discusses the role of NIMH and others in the bench-to-bedside story of bexanolone, which has just been approved by the FDA as the first treatment specifically for postpartum depression. 

Mental illnesses are a global problem. In this director’s Message, Dr. Gordon discusses his recent trip to Nepal and Kenya to see how NIMH is helping bring cutting-edge research to bear on the problems facing individuals with mental illnesses in low-resource settings.

Dr. Gordon discusses NIMH’s role in The Helping to End Addiction Long-term^SM Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative^SM, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) all-in, coordinated response to the opioid epidemic.

The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) focuses on research which translates basic neuroscience findings into novel treatments. In this Director’s Message, Dr. Gordon discusses some of the exciting work presented at this year’s ACNP meeting.

Those of you who follow Dr. Gordon on Twitter (@NIMHDirector) may have seen snippets of his experiences at the 2018 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), the largest gathering of neuroscientists in the world. In this Director’s message, Dr. Gordon highlights some of the excellent basic research on display at this year’s conference.