About The Rhode Island Institute for Mental Health Excellence

An Innovative Integration of Research and Practice 

Now, for the first time, the Rhode Island Institute for Mental Health Excellence brings together internationally recognized institutions with these capacities under one roof.  The non-profit consortium will integrate the leading-edge research capacity of Brown University, one of the nation’s five largest recipients of investigator-initiated National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants in the field; the medical resources of nationally recognized mental health specialty institutions, Bradley and Butler Hospitals; comprehensive medical-surgical institutions with excellent mental health programs, including Rhode Island Hospital, Miriam Hospital, and Women and Infant’s Hospital; and one of the country’s strongest community based mental health care systems with such leading providers as the Providence Center and Gateway.  By combining these resources, the Rhode Island Institute for Mental Health Excellence is well-positioned to bring cutting-edge research to real-world, community-based settings and thereby make mental health research more relevant to practice and shorten the bench-to-bedside cycle.

Unique Partnership, Unique Capabilities

In bringing together the research and treatment assets of the state in a unique partnership, the Rhode Island Institute for Mental Health Excellence will bring new capabilities to its core goals:

• To be a major source of new cutting-edge mental health research leading to discoveries of the genetic and environmental causes of mental and addictive illnesses, and to develop more effective approaches to prevention, diagnosis, and new future treatments.

• To conduct research that is of maximum utility to community-based providers.

• To research the comparative effectiveness of currently available and newly developed treatments and education and outreach programs.

• To improve the quality and effectiveness of care by developing nationally applicable, science-based performance metrics.

• To coordinate the delivery of medical knowledge to patients and their families and to educate healthcare professionals and the public.

The Rhode Island Advantage

Rhode Island is ideally suited to serve as the nation’s laboratory for accelerating advancements in research to practice and workforce development.  It is home to a broad array of nationally recognized mental health research and treatment institutions that have come together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts.  Our nation’s geographically smallest state is also demographically representative of the country’s population, and the diversity and stability of the population makes Rhode Island an exceptionally favorable location for epidemiologic and long-term prospective naturalistic, longitudinal, and follow-up studies. 

Conclusion: A New Model for a New Era

The NIH’s “Decade of the Brain” ushered in a new era with dramatic new knowledge of the brain and its diseases.  The Rhode Island Institute for Mental Health Excellence will serve as a national model for conducting state-of-the-art bench-to-bedside research and then creating a model for rapidly integrating the findings of this research into evidenced-based practice.  It will be a national destination for individuals seeking the latest innovative treatments for mental and addictive illnesses.  In so doing, the Center will harness the explosive growth in new science to bring breakthroughs in prevention, detection, and treatment to individuals with mental and addictive illnesses across the country.