Career development and training in geriatric mental health: report of an NIMH workshop

At a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-sponsored meeting, the participants discussed means of increasing the pool of late-life mental-illness researchers. Approaches identified included encouraging retention of junior scientists through greater mentoring and support; creation of research postdoctoral programs by investigators and institutions that lack late-life emphasis; earlier commitment to late-life research with predoctoral training mechanisms; recruitment of ethnic and racial minority scholars into late-life research; and recruitment of newly established researchers through postdoctoral training mechanisms. Federal, public, and private mechanisms need to be better leveraged to grow late-life mental-illness research infrastructure and meet increasing demand and scientific opportunities.