The Crisis in Academic Research
When funding shortages meet diagnostic inflation
It's no secret that those of us making a living in academia are in a panic right now. Federal funding for research has always been scarce, but the current situation is, frankly, catastrophic. The funding crisis is undermining so much critical work in ways both expected and unexpected, threatening to halt progress in fields that could benefit millions of people.
I had lunch yesterday with some of my former coworkers, and we commiserated about this sad state of affairs. My colleagues told me that a major focus of their work these days has been cognitive control: the mental processes that allow us to adapt our behavior in response to changing environments and goals. It’s well accepted in the field that our standard tests of cognitive control have poor reliability, so they designed a study to investigate the root causes of these measurement problems and to figure out ways to improve them. It's vital research. The tests they are investigating are used widely in clinical settings and research studies, forming the foundation for much of our understanding of various mental health conditions. Improving their reliability could have far-reaching implications.
However, to assess these measures' reliability, my friends need to recruit and test healthy control subjects: people without diagnosed psychopathology who presumably have intact cognitive control abilities. These control groups form the baseline against which other populations are compared. The problem is they cannot recruit a healthy control group because almost everyone they speak to is diagnosed with something.
I suggested that they develop their own set of diagnostic criteria and reassess potential participants for inclusion and exclusion. This would allow them to filter out individuals whose prior diagnoses might not actually represent significant functional impairments. Their response was, while it's a good idea in theory, scarce funding makes it impossible in practice. They simply can't afford to conduct their own diagnostic re-evaluations.
The intersection of overdiagnosis in the mental health field and research funding shortages has created for them a perfect storm, and now they are in an impossible position. An important study that may have been feasible just a few months ago may no longer be. The combination of diagnostic inflation and funding scarcity is threatening to halt their research, which could potentially improve clinical measures used across psychology, psychiatry, and neurology.
While a lot of academic research finds itself on pause, the responsibility falls to practicing clinicians to uphold and advance the discipline through unflinching ethical practice, diagnostic precision, and the highest possible standards of care. The gap between what we know and what we need to know can only widen during research lulls, but clinicians who practice with uncompromising integrity can bridge that gap, preserving the field's core values until research can resume its progress. When research funding eventually recovers, it will be the careful, ethical work of today's clinicians that provides the foundation for tomorrow's discoveries.
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How did I not know that this video exists until today?