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The annual program is designed to support research on suicide from a variety of disciplines, including psychiatry, medicine, psychology, genetics, epidemiology, neurobiology, sociology, nursing, health services administration, social work, and many others. Grants of up to $300,000 over two years will be awarded to investigators at any level performing research involving two or more unique sites, with each site contributing unique expertise as well as data collection.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages research project grant (R01) applications to leverage large-scale, real-world data from electronic health records (EHRs) from a variety of systems (e.g., the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrative claims, as well as public or private health care systems and networks) to understand risk, onset, course, and impact of treatments and services for mental and neurological disorders and to identify promising new mental health and neurological disorders research. There is particular interest in leveraging EHRs and administrative data to 1) understand and improve the treatment of post traumatic psychopathology, including posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and risk for suicide; and 2) characterize post-trauma multi-symptom recovery trajectory patterns of TBI, that may include post traumatic stress disorder, depression, cognitive impairment, pain, substance abuse disorder and risk for suicide. NIMH also invites innovative approaches to use EHR and administrative data to understand risk, onset, course, and impact of treatments and services for mental disorders more broadly.

The National Research Action Plan (NRAP) responding to Executive Order 13625, Improving Access to Mental Health Services for Veterans, Service Members, and Military Families (August 31, 2012), lays out a framework to ensure that Government funding agencies work together to further our knowledge and diagnostic/therapeutic capabilities with regard to post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), TBI, suicide, and related injuries by following longitudinal cohorts of Service members and Veterans. The DoD and VA ORD meet this directive through continued collaboration on and coordination of research efforts in the areas of TBI and PTSD. Additionally, recommendations from the DoD Blast Injury Research Program Coordinating Office's November 2015 International State of the Science Meeting (Does Repeated Blast- Related Trauma Contribute to the Development of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)?) included pursuing longitudinal studies to evaluate links between blast-related TBI with CTE. While a number of longitudinal efforts are ongoing, the DoD and VA seek to pursue a mechanism to collaboratively streamline and continue longitudinal studies of mTBI in active duty and Veteran populations. The objective of this effort is to solicit a single Consortium of a large longitudinal study and supporting sub-studies to analyze a large TBI cohort to include Service members, Veterans, and relevant populations.

There are 5.4 million individuals who self-identify as American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) in the US, and there are 567 federally registered tribes. While characterized by many strengths and resiliencies, as a whole, AI/AN populations experience significant disparities compared to the general population across a range of health conditions and outcomes, including infant mortality, alcohol-related mortality, substance abuse, unintentional injury, homicide, suicide, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obesity, chronic kidney disease, asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, selected cancers, and other chronic diseases. Premature death rates, while decreasing in other US racial/ethnic minority populations over the past 15 years, are increasing among AI/AN populations. However, the examination of data on AI/AN populations in aggregate may obscure the significant heterogeneity within the AI/AN population due to tribal affiliation, geographic region, and other factors. For example, gastric cancers affect AI/AN populations in different parts of the country at different rates ranging from 6.1/100,00 in the Eastern US to 24.5/100,000 in Alaska. At the same time, national survey and epidemiological studies often do not report data on AI/AN populations because the numbers are too small or AI/AN individuals are folded into the highly heterogeneous "Other" category, thus not available to interpret any health outcomes specific for AI/AN populations. For these reasons, there is a critical need to build a more comprehensive evidence base regarding the health of AI/AN populations.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for R34 applications seeks to support: (a) pilot and/or feasibility testing of innovative new, revised, or adapted prevention intervention approaches to prevent or delay the initiation and onset of drug and alcohol use, the progression to misuse or problem use or alcohol and other substance use disorder, reduce drinking and driving and deaths related to impaired driving, prevent suicide attempts (nonfatal and fatal), and the drug- or alcohol-related acquisition or transmission of HIV infection and viral hepatitis among diverse populations and settings; and, (b) pre-trial feasibility and acceptability testing for prevention services and systems research. It is expected that research conducted via this mechanism will consist of studies that are a pre-requisite for preparing and submitting subsequent applications for larger scale drug or alcohol abuse prevention and/or drug- or alcohol-related HIV prevention intervention studies. This FOA does not support applications for which the sole focus is development of intervention protocols, manuals, or the standardization of protocols. Any intervention development work must be imbedded within a pilot/feasibility study. Of particular interest is prevention research that addresses current public health priorities and priority settings and systems.