World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Training and Research in
Mental Health and in the Prevention of Substance Abuse
World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Training and Research in
Mental Health and in the Prevention of Substance Abuse
The Center is located at Statistics and Services Research Division of The Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (NKI) and at New York University Medical Center (NYU). NKI, one of two research institutes of the New York State Office of Mental Health, was founded in 1952 by Nathan S. Kline, M.D. Supported by state funds and grants and contracts from the federal government and other agencies and foundations, NKI is dedicated to studying the etiology, treatment and prevention of mental illness and to developing data collection and analytic methodologies for use in mental health program management.
The Division staff includes professionals in anthropology, computer science, economics, education, epidemiology, mathematics, psychology, sociology, and statistics. Current programs include studies of problem populations such as persons who are mentally ill and homeless and those who are mentally ill and abuse chemicals; the development of statistical and economic models of financing and reimbursements for psychiatric care; the development of methods for designing experiments and for analyzing results of clinical drug trials; the development of statistical techniques for analyzing mental health data and the creation of educational materials to facilitate information/technology transfer.The Statistics and Services Research Division consults and collaborates with central management groups in the office of Mental Health.
The Director of the Center for the Study of Issues in Public Mental Health and the heads of the population and the methodology cores are members of the Division.
The Center is governed by the Director, Deputy Director and a steering committee consisting of the Heads of the Statistical Sciences Laboratory, the Epidemiology and Health Services Research Laboratory and the Educational Technology Laboratory and the Director of the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. Coordination with WHO is through direct communication with officials of the Mental Health Division and of the Programme on Substance Abuse.
NKI occupies more than 200,000 square feet of space in several buildings on a campus in Orangeburg, NY. The facilities include laboratories, offices, classrooms, conference facilities, photo laboratory, library, imaging center, and autopsy center. The NKI Local Area Network consists of over 400 workstations inter-connected via fiber optic cabling, which provides a data transfer speed of one gigabyte per second. NKI’s Network Server environment consists of 16 Windows 2000 servers and continues to grow. Our Application and Print Server provides internal access to SPSS, SAS, Reference Manager, and all networked printers.
Established in 1987, the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse is operated jointly by The Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (NKI) and New York University Medical Center (NYU) with components at both sites and at the NYU teaching affiliate, Bellevue Hospital Center. Approximately 500 patients are treated in the academic clinical units each day.