ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2025
Experimental Therapeutics: Opportunities and Challenges Stemming From the National Institute of Mental Health Workshop on Novel Target Discovery and Psychosocial Intervention Development.
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Digital Therapeutic Intervention for Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2026Trial
- Exercise priming to enhance therapeutic bond and behavioral activation in CBT for MDD: a randomized controlled target-engagement trial with remission signal.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Trial
- Randomized controlled trial of computerized working memory training for Veterans with PTSD.Journal of psychiatric research · 2025Trial
- Editorial: Mechanism-specific developmental windows of opportunity in the prevention of youth psychopathology.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Active Ingredients in Digital Cognitive Interventions: Integrating Dismantling Designs With Mechanistic Neuroscience.JMIR mental health · 2026Article
- What to target? Interventions to modulate key mechanisms underlying the trajectories of affective disorders in the transregional Collaborative Research Center 393.Der Nervenarzt · 2026Review
- Pilot Study of Behavioral Activation Treatment for Negative Symptoms in Older Adults With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder.Psychiatric research and clinical practice · 2026Article
- Change in psychosocial target processes during prenatal depression intervention: A randomized clinical trial.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2025Article
- Article
- Experimental Therapeutics: Opportunities and Challenges Stemming From the National Institute of Mental Health Workshop on Novel Target Discovery and Psychosocial Intervention Development.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Adaptive Just-in-Time Intervention to Reduce Everyday Stress Responses: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.JMIR research protocols · 2025Article
- What's next for the field of multigenerational mental health? The need for deep behavioral phenotyping via a prenatal mental health registry.Development and psychopathology · 2024Article
- Social visual attention as a treatment outcome: evaluating the social games for autistic adolescents (SAGA) intervention.Scientific reports · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
There has been slow progress in the development of interventions that prevent and/or reduce mental-health morbidity and mortality. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) launched an experimental-therapeutics initiative with the goal of accelerating the development of effective interventions. The emphasis is on interventions designed to engage a target mechanism. A target mechanism is a process (e.g., behavioral, neurobiological) proposed to underlie change in a defined clinical endpoint and through change in which an intervention exerts its effect. This article is based on discussions from an NIMH workshop conducted in February 2020 and subsequent conversations among researchers using this approach. We discuss the components of an experimental-therapeutics approach such as clinical-outcome selection, target definition and measurement, intervention design and selection, and implementation of a team-science strategy. We emphasize the important contributions of different constituencies (e.g., patients, caregivers, providers) in deriving hypotheses about novel target mechanisms. We highlight strategies for target-mechanism identification using published and hypothetical examples. We consider the decision-making dilemmas that arise with different patterns of results in purported mechanisms and clinical outcomes. We end with considerations of the practical challenges of this approach and the implications for future directions of this initiative.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.