“Studying healthy people can help researchers understand how the brain works in states of health and illness. Although many mental health studies include healthy participants as a comparison group, these studies typically focus on selected measures relevant to a certain functional domain or specific mental illness. The Healthy Research Volunteer Study at the National Institute of Mental Health aims to build a comprehensive, publicly accessible resource with a range of brain and behavioral data from healthy volunteers.

This resource aims to shed light on basic questions about brain function and translational questions about the relationship between brain and behavior. Although the study focuses on healthy volunteers, the data also have relevance to clinical questions about neurobiological, cognitive, and emotional processes associated with certain mental illnesses.

The NIMH Healthy Research Volunteer Study is unique in the breadth and depth of its measures. All data collected as part of the study are anonymized and shared with the research community via the OpenNeuro repository….”