12 FARRERAS
NIMH Extramural Program
The Community Services Branch, headed by James V. Lowry, surveyed
regional mental health resources, needs, and problems and provided
grants-in-aid and other assistance to help states develop and strengthen
their mental health programs. The Training and Standards Branch,
headed by Seymour D. Vestermark, provided grants to individuals and
institutions for training in mental health and to “increase the supply of
psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, and psychiatric social
workers.”^44 The Research Grants and Fellowships Branch was headed by
Lawrence Coleman Kolb, son of Lawrence Kolb, until 1949. Psycholo
gist John C. Eberhart succeeded him and the branch provided fellowships
and grants to individuals and institutions throughout the country con
ducting research on mental and neurological disorders.
The four key disciplines in mental health, psychiatry, psychology,
social work, and psychiatric nursing, were represented and developed at
the new institute. A 1952 analysis of the first five years of the NIMH
research grant program reveals that over $5 million were spent on 165
projects focusing on “the etiology of mental illness, development or
evaluation of treatment methods, normal child development, studies of
the nervous system, and the relation of environmental stress to mental
health and illness.”^45 Sixty-four percent of all of the applications were
submitted by psychiatrists and psychologists, who received 70 percent
of all of the funds. Although medical schools carried out most of the
nation’s health and medical research at that time, they only received 11
percent of the funds directed toward mental health research. Forty-three
percent of all of the applications were submitted by colleges and uni
versities, receiving 52 percent of the funds.^46
Psychiatry, however, clearly took the lion’s share of the funding avail
able from the NIMH extramural program. Although the Training and
Standards Branch tried to bring in all four disciplines, the NMHAC
and the Training and Standards Branch committee needed a mechanism
that would decide how to distribute the funds. Because the psychiatrist
was seen as “a very key person in the mental health program [without
whom there] probably couldn’t be much of a program” and because
of psychiatrists’ higher salaries vis-à-vis those of the other disciplines, a