Uncertainty Weighs on Mental Health Researchers

Last year, social psychologist Kathleen Ethier was going on 26 years at the Centers for Disease Control and feeling hopeful about the growing response to national mental health concerns, especially among America’s youth. 

The Covid-19 pandemic had ushered in new urgency to understand why young people were struggling and find solutions, including ones schools and colleges might help implement.

“In the 35 years that I had spent in the field, I had never seen us all come together in that way,” said Ethier, who was the director of the C.D.C.’s division of adolescent and school health for eight years. 

But that was another time and another administration. When Ethier left her post in January of her own volition to enter the private sector, her faith in the progress of her field was slipping. The conversations that had been fueling her optimism seemed to stop. “We were no longer talking about youth mental health,” she said. 

Since the beginning of the year, widespread cuts to federal funding for scientific inquiry have been chipping away at the advancement of work on student mental health. Despite the issue’s record of bipartisan support, pertinent research and services have become casualties amid slashes to government agencies, programs, and grants

On college campuses, the fallout is multi-fold, threatening the wellbeing of not only students who struggle with their mental health but researchers and practitioners who now find their livelihoods at risk. 

“All of these high points of funding were just taken away,” Ethier said of the shift under the second Trump administration. “Everyone on the other end of that — whether those are school systems or universities or researchers — are all suffering from the loss of those resources, which means the loss of viable alternatives for young people.”

This summer, a group of mostly Harvard University-affiliated researchers released their findings on the total cost of mental health- and substance abuse-related grants cancelled between February 28 and April 11: The estimated loss is more than $2 billion from 474 grants across the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

While some grants have been reinstated since the spring, others still hang in the balance. An online database, Grant Witness, continues to update a list of all grants cancelled by both the N.I.H. and N.S.F. As of November 3, the tracker marked around 140 grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, spanning less than $50,000 to more than $9 million, as “terminated.”

In an unfortunate but telling irony, Grant Witness co-founder Scott Delaney launched the database after being conditionally laid off from his work as a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where a federal funding freeze had affected his salary. The former lawyer turned climate scientist called Grant Witness a “tool to fight for these grants and to fight for American science.” 

“We're losing a huge competitive advantage in global research. We're losing health benefits from research,” Delaney said of some of the concerns motivating his work. He also contributed to the report on mental health-related grant losses this spring.

Those N.I.M.H. grants that remain terminated had been supporting research on a range of populations and neurological and behavioral conditions. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, had a $3.8 million grant cancelled that was funding a longitudinal study following preschoolers into adolescence to determine early risk factors of psychopathology. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, another $3 million grant was cancelled that had been designated to help strengthen understandings of “Aging, Major Life Transitions, and Suicide Risk.”

Certain grants were terminated for backing projects deemed in conflict with the Trump administration’s orders against the promotion of ideas like “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the mental health context, these cancellations could threaten developing understandings of unique factors and barriers affecting the wellbeing of racial, gender, and sexual minority groups. More than one lawsuit is now underway in an effort to reverse these types of cuts to research on “disfavored topics and populations.” 

Another subset of grant losses has been the result of funding freezes on entire universities. Because these kinds of actions are targeting institutions, rather than particular research areas, mental health is one of countless disciplines implicated.

At Harvard Medical School, Professor Haiden Huskamp had been overseeing multiple training and research projects supported by the N.I.H. when the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion worth of federal funding for the Ivy League institution. 

The freeze came in April after Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the Trump administration that the Cambridge university considered overreach and an attempt to curb academic freedom. (These same events led to the frozen salary of Scott Delaney from Grant Witness.) 

For Huskamp, the fallout meant her research on the impact of telemedicine for the treatment of mental illness and opioid use disorder was put on hold. While Harvard launched a lawsuit to restore the funding, she grappled with the uncertainty of both her work and her team.

 “You're in the middle of a project, and you're moving full steam ahead, but you basically just have to stop,” she said. “You worry that, depending on how long it goes, will you have to lay people off? Will you not be able to keep accessing data? Will you be able to pick it up easily?”

After around five months, Huskamp was able to reclaim her funding when a judge sided with Harvard and ruled the government’s funding freeze unconstitutional. But the damage of the delay was done.

Harvard’s researchers may not be completely out of the woods. President Trump has promised to appeal the judge’s recent ruling in favor of the university, while his administration already launched separate proceedings to bar Harvard from all business — grants included — with the government.

For other mental health researchers, the challenge is not having lost grants but rather trying to raise money for the first time in this new funding environment. 

At Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, psychology professors Karin Coifman and John Gunstad are seeking support for what they hope will become one of the largest lifetime longitudinal studies ever on college student health, including mental health. For the aptly named Student Life Study, the researchers aim to recruit 10,000 students and collect health data from them throughout their lives. 

With an initial $450,000 from their institution to get them started, Coifman and Gunstad knew they would need to raise the rest of their funds — the majority — from other sources. What they couldn’t have anticipated was a confusing standstill at the N.I.H. this winter, just when they started applying for federal grants.  

In February, the N.I.H. temporarily stopped reviewing grant applications after the Trump administration blocked the agency from calling the necessary meetings. About 16,000 applications and $1.5 billion in funding hung in the balance as a result. At the same time, more than 1,000 employees at the N.I.H. had been laid off.

Given the upheaval, Coifman held off from reapplying for N.I.H. funding this spring. She only decided to reenter the fray in the fall after she served on a panel to review N.I.H. grant proposals and found things were once again proceeding smoothly.

Still, with the 2026 federal budget up in the air, the potential scarcity of available funds continues to stoke concern. President Trump proposed to slash the N.I.H. discretionary budget by a daunting 40 percent, or $18 billion, although his plans seem unlikely to pass given Congress’ push for funding at current levels or higher.

Preparing for all scenarios, Coifman said she will continue pursuing funding from every possible source: at the state level, as well as from private foundations and corporations. She understands other researchers, feeling a similar crunch, will be doing the same.

“There's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of vulnerability,” Coifman said. “Because we don't really understand the processes and how they're shifting.”

Eric Wood, the director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, called the evolving state of federal funding at universities a “pendulum swing back and forth.” 

“I think what most people would want is just stability — just to be able to predict what's going on,” he said.

Wood is also sensitive to what he believes to be growing perception of higher education as generally unstable. This narrative, he worries, could prevent not only researchers but clinicians like himself from wanting to work at universities, if they think the job security is precarious. 

“People wanted to work in higher education because you get so many different avenues, where you can explore different treatments; you have different populations of students,” Wood said. “But now I think people are saying, ‘Would I just have more freedom working in private practice?’”

“That obviously disadvantages our students if we can't fill a position,” he added, referring to job openings for counseling staff.  

According to Sara Abelson, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, graduate students who once planned for careers in research are similarly reconsidering their paths. Lately, they’ve been expressing their skepticism about the availability of future opportunities. 

“What can I do with my timing? How can I not come out as a new trained researcher in the current moment? Is it a safe and stable field to go into?” Abelson said students have been asking her.

So while Abelson has personally avoided funding cuts to her work, she maintains a front row seat to the fallout for not only colleagues but the wider mental health field. The message she said she and fellow staff are hearing is to “play it safe — pick something safe and do it perfectly.” She worries about how innovation in mental health work will suffer — about the capacity to make headway on behalf of all students going forward, and not just some.

“There's no doubt that it is impacting the field,” she said of the funding upheaval. 

“It's impacting the mental health and wellbeing of those who are the focus of the grants and those leading the work, and it’s going to have lasting impacts.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.