Improving Health and Reducing Premature Mortality in People with Severe Mental Illness (R01)

Grants are available to USA and territories non-profits, businesses, universities, and others for research aimed at reducing premature mortality of individuals with serious mental illness. Eligible organizations can receive funds to research interventions that will decrease the health risk factors that contribute to premature mortality among adults with serious mental illness or to research common modifiable health risk factors at an early stage in the developmental process as it relates to children and youth with serious emotional disturbances.

This initiative will support research that builds on strategies proven effective in reducing modifiable health risk factors in the general population. Applications that develop and test service interventions for large-scale delivery of these effective strategies to people with severe mental illness (SMI) or serious emotional disturbances (SED) are encouraged. To that end, critical aspects of the intervention and delivery strategy should be designed so as to support broad dissemination and implementation of the approach should it prove effective. The research generated should address at least one of the following questions:

1. How can strategies proven effective for reducing common modifiable health risk factors in the general population be adapted with the goal of achieving equivalent effectiveness for people with SMI or SED?
2. How can capacity to deliver needed health risk prevention and reduction be significantly improved to reach the largest number of people with SMI or SED?

In addition, NIMH encourages applicants to also consider factors influencing implementation of the services intervention that is the focus of the research project. Services interventions with health promotion, lifestyle change and self-management components for people with SMI are encouraged, as well as those integrating intervention components in order to target multiple health risk factors and/or increase the magnitude of treatment effects. Examples of services interventions for people with SMI or SED might include, but are not limited to, those involving one or more of the following:

* Diabetes prevention
* Cardiovascular disease prevention
* Obesity prevention
* Fitness and diet improvement
* Psychotropic polypharmacy reduction
* Tobacco cessation
* Antipsychotic medication management that maximizes optimal psychiatric and functional outcomes while minimizing side effects and adverse health consequences

The services intervention must specifically target people with SMI or SED and modifiable health risk factors that are the primary causes of premature mortality in this population. Ideally, the services intervention will have the following features:

* Demonstrated clinical effectiveness of the intervention's core components in the general population (although adaption may be needed for equivalent effectiveness in people with SMI or SED);

* Relevance to the life circumstances of people with SMI or SED;

* Conducted in a community-based setting that serves as a platform to engage this population (either within or outside of traditional healthcare settings);

* Potential to produce clinically (not just statistically) significant health improvement and reduction in common modifiable health risk factors associated with early mortality in people with SMI;

* Target all people with SMI or SED in a given setting, community or care delivery system;

* High likelihood for real-world feasibility in terms of required resources, staffing, training, and patient acceptability;

* Strong potential to be expanded easily to many settings, so as to reach a large portion of people with SMI or SED at risk, should the services intervention prove clinically effective with this population.