Several factors converge to make this funding environment particularly challenging. One is the flattening of the NIH budget. We're not in an era any longer of seeing the doubling of the NIH budget, of the increase in funding for services research. So for all researchers who are turning to the NIH, regardless of topic, these are pretty grim times.

Second, social work, social services, and any service delivery agenda faces particular challenges in that we don 't have a home at NIH. The NIH is carved up around diseases, mental disorder, drug addiction, or body parts, the eye, health disease, diabetes, and there is no national institute for social service research. We have no funding institute where the broad and unique topics that social workers pursue is the research agenda. So on the positive side, that gives us a lot of institutes that we can take our questions to. On the challenging side, it means that we have to be very skilled at aligning our research questions with the agenda of institutes whose mission is not first and foremost or fundamentally aligned with social work.

Third, we're in an era of an increased emphasis on neurobiological factors in mental health, so that flat mental health budget, for instance, is being shifted proportionately to look at biological bases of mental disorder in the hopes that eventually we'll have progress about the brain origins of mental disorder that, in the words of Tom Insel, will put schizophrenia off the map. Well, we 're a long way from there, and that research is not likely to be the kind that social workers are playing a key role in.

What I worry about is that the public health aspects of the NIMH mission sometimes are overshadowed by the emphasis on the basic biological discovery, as important as that is, so we have to be very skilled and expert at what we do. We also have to be very savvy at being able to advocate the importance of the work we do. For instance, the treatments that we now do have for addressing the symptoms and the functional consequences of mental health problems, those treatments aren't being extended into real world systems of care.

There are estimates that new practices sit and, as they say, languish on the shelf for 15 to 20 years before they're implemented in routine care. So there 's a huge agenda and a huge opportunity for social services research to be working on issues of extending the benefits of science to vulnerable populations, to real world settings of care, the very kind of work that social work needs to do. So when we combine the flat budget, the fact that we don't have a home, and the fact that services research, social services research, is sometimes overshadowed by the more fundamental basic research, it does present problems.