Mind, Brain, Body, and Behavior

10 FARRERAS

institutes. Dyer objected to the training and community services com­

ponents which Felix wanted to bring on board but he finally agreed, in

exchange for the transfer of the Lexington and Fort Worth narcotic farms

to the Division of Hospitals within the Bureau of Medical Services.^39

When the NIMH became one of the institutes of the NIH, the PHS

Division of Mental Hygiene was abolished. Given the lack of knowledge

at the time about the etiology, prevention, and treatment of mental ill­

ness, the NIMH readily decided that it would support and fund research

in any field related to mental illness. Such a broad mission was impor­

tant; the NIMH did not share the prestige of the other NIH institutes

at the time. In Felix’s words:

This wasn’t the most friendly climate....I got nothing but

misunderstanding....We weren’t respectable. Clinical research

in psychiatry wasn’t even research. There wasn’t any basic

research going on. We weren’t doing any physiology, or

chemistry and so forth. All we did was listen to people talk

and then draw hypotheses and say that they were facts. We

were sloppy in the way we did things. You could see the

hostility, and you could see the fear of us. These guys were a

little nervous about these psychiatrists. As one guy told me

one time...“I don’t like to sit in a Directors’ staff meeting

with you because I think all the time you’re trying to psych

me [out], and I’m on my guard from the minute I walk in the

room, until you walk out. I don’t like you around.”^40

Felix and the NMHAC thus decided that mental health research would

never be targeted research. As Felix said, “[W]e would never say, ‘We

want to do research in so and so,’ but rather this would be free research

in order that we could sift and mine the largest amount of dirt, to see

where there was pay.”^41

In addition to research focusing on mental illness, the NIMH was

unique in that it incorporated a social mission–including training and

services in addition to research. It also went beyond basic and clinical

biomedical research to include and support behavioral and social science

research.^42 The NIMH’s operating programs consisted of four principal

branches: a Community Services Branch (consultant services to states);