An in-depth investigation is needed into taxpayer dollars spent on bizarre research of animals, fish and insects, in a failed attempt to understand human behavior and improve mental health.

By Jan Eastgate
President, CCHR International
November 27, 2024

With government waste raising economic concerns for the country, it is time to demand accountability for the $40 billion allocated to the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH). The agency has funded questionable research on fruit flies, mouse brains, zebrafish, Siberian hamsters, Russian cats, and other animal groups, purportedly to address mental health issues. Recent research reveals over $2.14 million was spent to study fruit fly brains.[1] A further $457,500 was allocated to study how early-life trauma affects brain development in zebrafish which may increase the risk of psychiatric disorders.[2] A $1,334,079 study is investigating the anatomical and structural organization of a healthy mouse brain and how it might regulate computation.[3]

Dr. Roger McFillin, Ph.D., who recently wrote “The Billion Dollar Brain Myth,” says, “Since 2000, American taxpayers have bankrolled over $40 billion in NIMH’s futile quest to reduce human suffering to faulty genes and brain circuits, yet suicide rates have soared” and “youth mental health collapsed.” With research prioritizing the “biomedical model,” he says, “the biological paradigm hasn’t just failed—it has actively harmed by teaching people their suffering is a brain defect rather than a meaningful response to life experiences.”[4]

For years, Senator Rand Paul has exposed such waste, including a December 2023 report revealing a study of Russian cats walking on treadmills.[5] In a 2021 Congressional speech, he condemned such “ridiculous” taxpayer-funded research, citing $1.6 million spent studying “Lizards on a Treadmill.”[6] He also criticized $356,000 spent studying whether or not “Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine.” Commenting on this, he said, “Common sense would have told us one that cocaine is probably not good for you and that cocaine might make you do things that you wouldn’t have done otherwise had you not been on cocaine.”[7] The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) also gave $2.3 million to inject beagle puppies with cocaine.[8]

Meanwhile, NIMH awarded $1.9 million, and NIDA $1.8 million, for experiments involving monkeys. These included removing parts of their skulls, injecting tracers into their brains, and observing their responses to gambling scenarios on screens.[9]

The National Institutes of Health, which oversees NIMH, provided over $3 million in funds annually to study steroid-induced hamster fighting and there was a Department of Health and Human Services $689,222 grant to study the romantic patterns of parrots.[10]

The failure of NIMH research was highlighted in a 2017 interview with Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and former NIMH director, 2002-2015, who said:

“I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”[11]

In 2010, Insel had called for his fellow psychiatrists to “clean up our act,” given the results of research and treatment.[12] The rallying cry does not seem to have been heard.

Twelve years later Insel conceded:

“The United States, a country that leads the world in spending on medical research, also stands out for its dismal outcomes in people with mental illnesses. Indeed, over the last three decades, even as the government invested billions of dollars in better understanding the brain, by some measures, those outcomes have deteriorated.”[13]

As an example, a 2011 government report found that just over one in 10 adults took prescription drugs for “problems with emotions, nerves or mental health,” according to a JAMA study. In 2013, one in six (17%) of U.S. adults reported taking a psychiatric drug.[14] By 2021, it had escalated to one in four Americans over the age of 18 taking these drugs.[15] IQVia reported 70,307,316 adults aged 18 and above taking psychotropic drugs, and 6.1 million ages 0-17. Of the latter, there were 418,425 in the 0-5 age group.[16]

Of all age groups, 45.2 million took antidepressants—a $15.6 billion-a-year industry.[17] Alongside this, there has been an increase in mass violence committed in society, although all psychiatric drugs have been linked to this. In 2004, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen said antidepressants could explain the many murder-suicides over the previous decade, stating, “The irritability and impulsivity can make people suicidal or homicidal.”[18] A 2021 analysis of the Mass Shooter Database from The Violence Project, which at the time was funded by the U.S. Justice Department, revealed at least 23% of mass shooters had been on psychiatric drugs, and this was based only on the information available, as the perpetrators’ toxicology and medical records were not always made public.[19] The percentage could be much higher.

Between 1999 and 2013, psychiatric drug prescriptions increased 117%, while the suicide rate increased by 24% between 1999 and 2014.[20] Today, psychotropic drug sales are a $25.8 billion a year industry in the U.S.

1995: Congress, NIMH and Psychiatry Put on Notice

Since 1995, CCHR has been exposing bizarre NIMH-funded research. At that time, the Acting Director of NIMH was psychiatrist Rex Cowdry. He spent 21 years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (1976-1997), during which he served as the Clinical Director and Acting Director of the NIMH (1994-1996). He then became medical director of the pharmaceutical company-funded non-government group, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (1999 and 2001).[21]

In 1995, Dr. Cowdry told Congress:

“We do not know the causes [of mental illness.] We don’t have methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” When questioned about the effectiveness of medications for these disorders, he admitted that these “control the symptoms” but do not “enable us to get to the root cause of illness.”[22]

Nearly 30 years later, NIMH is no closer. Yet on August 26, 2024, the agency announced, “For 75 years, NIMH has transformed the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research—bringing hope to millions of people.” Each year, NIMH spends about $1.8 billion to “support cutting-edge mental health research at institutions worldwide.”[23]

In 2023 alone, NIMH received $2.3 billion in appropriations.[24]

The “Cutting Edge” Research on Rat Pups, Crickets, Lizards, Horses and More

In 1995, CCHR’s examination of this so-called “cutting edge” NIMH research revealed that $20,387,177 had been spent on 25 studies alone, which included budgerigars (parakeets), crickets, electric fish, rat pups, whiptail lizards, zebra and swamp fish, Siamese fighting fish, treefrogs, guinea pigs, Siberian hamsters, and horses.

This information was provided to members of Congress, and exposed in media, alerting groups such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The research included:

• As of 1995, $10,977,790 had been provided for 31 years to study the effect of drugs on rats when they were “subjected to mild, persistent, inescapable stress.”
• $1.5 million for a 21-year study of rat-pup behavior.
• A 30-year study of the vocal learning of birds.
• $1.14 million to study the sexual behavior of animals, including rhesus monkeys and guinea pigs, including $22,352 to study the “effects of anesthetic ointments applied to the penis of rhesus monkey and guinea pigs.”
• $771,805 for a 19-year study whiptail lizards’ sexual development.
• $213,000 to study crickets and flies as model systems for understanding sensory processing and communication.
• A 21-year grant, starting in 1975, received $1,631,035 to study the “electronic chirping” of electric fish,
• $1.4 million to explore the “neuronal basis for electric signal recognition among pulse-type electric fish”.
• $1.39 million for research on the “vocal signals in the brains of zebra finches”
• $875,382 on zebrafish and swamp sparrows.
• $321,097 for a study budgerigars.
• $215,804 to research Siamese fighting fish to understand aggression; and a 2-year study of Siberian hamsters’ reproductive glands. $193,116 on how communication mediates sexual responsiveness in treefrogs.
• Between 1972 and 1997, $2,364,732 was awarded for researchers at Hunter College, New York to study the feeding and drinking behaviors of pigeons.
• Researchers at New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center, Psychiatry Department spent 15 years studying male and female obese rats and mice to analyze the effect of food stimuli on their meal size. As of 1996, the grant had been awarded $1,107,534.
• There was $200,000 spent on a 4-year study of sexual behavior which included researchers masturbating horses.
• A 32-year study costing $1.2 million to learn how rats react when “startled” while under the influence of hallucinogens such as LSD.
• $1.76 million for a 23-year study of the sexual odors and social factors that affect male Asian monkeys.
• $333,000 for 8 years of studying the sexual behavior of castrated quail.[25]

At that time Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, and a former legislative director for Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr. stated: “It’s time to part the veil of secrecy and esoteric semantics surrounding some of the NIMH grants and let taxpayers know what kind of wacky, even sinister science-fair experiments they’re paying for. We want NIMH on a very, very short leash.”

The National Alliance on Mental Illness abhorred the fact that CCHR led the charge exposing wasteful NIMH research, writing that it was CCHR, not NAMI “who have brought the fact that NIMH wastes money on idiotic research to the publics’ attention” and “who hold the APA accountable for ‘the cure causing the disease.’”

Efforts to rein in NIMH have fallen short. This is despite a 2008 mandate from Congress for the creation of the Research Condition and Disease Categorization Database (RCDC), which was designed to give the public transparency into how the NIH spends taxpayer dollars.[26]

Led by Thomas Insel, the “project claimed it would finally crack the biological code of mental states.”[27] But, in his 2022 book, Insel admitted, “I should have been able to help us bend the curves for death and disability. But I didn’t.”[28]

Another NIMH Failure: “Decade of the Brain”

In the late 1980s, psychiatrist and then director of the NIMH, Lewis Judd, persuaded Congress to declare the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain,” launching a massively funded biomedical approach to researching mental travail.

Dr. McFillin noted critically that since the 1990s “Decade of the Brain” research “has transformed natural human responses into ‘brain disorders,’ while rates of mental distress have skyrocketed.” Furthermore, “The result is a society more medicated yet more distressed than ever….”[29]

In an article in The Scientist, Elizabeth Pennisi, a science journalist, and author Diana Morgan called the Decade of the Brain “a banner for their members and allied organizations to rally around. It provided ammunition to justify bigger budgets” and relief for researchers after funding rates [had] dropped “as low as 10% of the research applications submitted in a particular specialty.”[30]

By 1994, the NIMH budget skyrocketed to $600 million, up from $90 million in 1976—a 567% increase. Not long after, Allen Frances, a psychiatrist and former Chairman of the APA Task Force updating its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), said that still “there are no objective tests in psychiatry—no X-ray, laboratory or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder…. There is no definition of mental disorder. It’s bull… I mean you just can’t define it.”[31]

Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, recently told The New York Times that neuroscience may have been “an exciting intellectual adventure…but it hasn’t helped a single patient.”[32]

Dr. Holly Swartz, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote that the mental health field is reckoning with “the failure of NIMH’s ‘Decade of the Brain’” and “I stand with these colleagues to hold NIMH accountable for its destructive policies….”[33]

The ongoing waste of taxpayer funds on questionable and ineffective NIMH research underscores the urgent need for accountability within the mental health sector. Despite billions of dollars spent, the lack of tangible improvements in public health, particularly in addressing mental health, demands a reevaluation of research priorities. The need for greater transparency and a focus on effective, humane treatments that are non-invasive and not physically harmful, has never been more critical. Ensuring accountability is needed now more than ever, and CCHR remains committed to investigating and exposing wasteful mental health research.

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References:

[1] “Accelerating connectomic proofreading for larger brains and multiple individuals,” NIH Project Number 1RF1MH129268-01, https://reporter.nih.gov/search/papyrvOkskKgaNQRXt63xQ/project-details/10413515

[2] “Determining the impact of early adversity on the developing vertebrate brain,” NIH Project Number 1R15MH132057-01, https://reporter.nih.gov/search/RqU1-esPzU-O52xxsG6D7w/project-details/10580285

[3] https://reporter.nih.gov/search/2rXC5XA9tEmWshK2IpYcWQ/project-details/10505417

[4] Dr. Roger McFillin, “The Billion Dollar Brain Myth, How NIMH’s biological reductionism stole hope, meaning, and billions from mental health care,” Radically Genuine, 21 Nov. 2024, https://drmcfillin.substack.com/p/the-billion-dollar-brain-myth

[5] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/reps/dr-paul-releases-2023-festivus-report-on-government-waste/

[6] Andrew Mark Miller, “‘Lizards on a treadmill’: Rand Paul calls out wasteful research spending with colorful props on Senate floor,” Washington Examiner, 28 May 2021,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2872317/lizards-on-a-treadmill-rand-paul-calls-out-wasteful-research-spending-with-colorful-props-on-senate-floor/

[7] Kristine Frazao, “Rand Paul: Studying sexual tendency of quails on cocaine is waste of government spending,” ABC 7 News, 5 July 2018, https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/spending-money-studying-quails-on-cocaine-is-waste-of-government-spending-says-rand-paul

[8] Senator Rand Paul, The Festivus Report 2022, p. 12, https://www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Festivus-23-clean-12.22-v2.pdf

[9] Senator Rand Paul, The Festivus Report 2022, p. 19, https://www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Festivus-23-clean-12.22-v2.pdf

[10] Senator Rand Paul, The Festivus Report 2022, pp.11-12, 14, https://www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Festivus-23-clean-12.22-v2.pdf

[11] https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.202000739

[12] Treacy Staton, “NIMH chief wants psychiatry to ‘clean up’,” Fierce Pharma, 24 Mar. 2010, https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/nimh-chief-wants-psychiatry-to-clean-up

[13] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/02/17/20-billion-in-psychiatric-fraud, citing, Dr. Stanton Peele, “How American Psychiatry Misled the World and Ruined Mental Health Worldwide,” Life Progress Plan, 2 Oct. 2023, https://lifeprocessprogram.com/american-psychiatry-misled-the-world/

[14] “1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug,” Scientific American, 13 Dec. 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/1-in-6-americans-takes-a-psychiatric-drug/

[15] https://quotewizard.com/news/mental-health-prescriptions

[16] Statistics obtained from IQVia, https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/people-taking-psychiatric-drugs/; https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/children-on-psychiatric-drugs/

[17] Statistics obtained from IQVia, https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/people-taking-psychiatric-drugs/; https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/antidepressants-drugs-market

[18] https://www.cchrint.org/2015/09/10/psychotropic-drugs-cause-suicide/; “FDA Mulls Antidepressant Warnings,” Daily Press, 21 Mar. 2004

[19] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/06/13/23-percent-mass-shooters-on-psychiatric-drugs/ citing, Sharon Shahid and Megan Duzor, “VOA SPECIAL REPORT: HISTORY OF MASS SHOOTERS,” VOA News, 1 June 2021, https://projects.voanews.com/mass-shootings/; “Mass Shooter Database,” The Violence Project, https://www.theviolenceproject.org/mass-shooter-database/; “Methodology,” The Violence Project, https://www.theviolenceproject.org/methodology/

[20] https://www.cchrint.org/2018/06/21/cchrs-psychotropic-drug-awareness-campaign-extends-to-suicide-warning/; “Psychiatric Medications Kill More Americans than Heroin,” Rehabs.com, 5 Jan. 2016, citing: MEPS (Medical Expenditure Panel Survey) database, https://web.archive.org/web/20160313191343/https://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/psychiatric-medications-kill-more-americans-than-heroin/; Sally C. Curtin, M.A., Margaret Warner, Ph.D., and Holly Hedegaard, M.D., M.S.P.H., “Increase in Suicide in the United States, 1999-2014,” NCHS Data Brief No. 241, Apr. 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db241.htm

[21] https://www.linkedin.com/in/rex-cowdry-6a268063/details/experience/

[22] Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations House of Representatives, Subcommittee on the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations 1996, Part 4, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, March 22, 1995, p. 1205

[23] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/messages/2024/partners-in-advancing-science-from-innovative-ideas-to-groundbreaking-research

[24] https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/appropriations-section-1

[25] NIH Extramural Grant Request Abstracts for NIMH, Various, on file with CCHR International, Project numbers available upon request to CCHR International research department

[26] https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.202000739

[27] Dr. Roger McFillin, “The Billion Dollar Brain Myth, How NIMH’s biological reductionism stole hope, meaning, and billions from mental health care,” Radically Genuine, 21 Nov. 2024

[28] Ellen Barry, “The ‘Nation’s Psychiatrist’ Takes Stock, With Frustration,” The New York Times, 22 Feb. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/us/thomas-insel-book.html

[29] Dr. Roger McFillin, “The Billion Dollar Brain Myth,” How NIMH’s biological reductionism stole hope, meaning, and billions from mental health care,” Radically Genuine, 21 Nov. 2024

[30] Elizabeth Pennisi and Diana Morgan, “‘Brain Decade’ Neuroscientists Court Support,” The Scientist, 29 Oct. 1990; T.M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry (Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 2000), p. 237

[31] https://www.cchrint.org/2014/06/13/scientific-community-finally-admits-what-cchr-has-said-for-decades/; T.M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry (Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 2000), p. 237

[32] Holly A. Swartz, “How We Got Here: The Demise of Psychotherapy Clinical Trials in America,” The Amer. Journ. of Psychotherapy, Vol. 75, No. 4., 15 Dec. 2022,
https://www.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20220064

[33] Holly A. Swartz, “How We Got Here: The Demise of Psychotherapy Clinical Trials in America,” The Amer. Journ. of Psychotherapy, Vol. 75, No. 4., 15 Dec. 2022,
https://www.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20220064