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Mental Health Goals

Published 6 December 2024

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/life-sciences-healthcare-goals/mental-health-goals

What we do

Mental ill health carries an extremely large burden of disease, with it now representing the single largest driver of disability in the UK. Alongside growing patient concerns, there has been a significant withdrawal of commercial investment into mental health research over recent decades, resulting in a lack of new treatments on the horizon. However, major advances in genetics, neuroscience, imaging, and data science, in addition to emerging new treatment approaches and rapid growth in digital technologies, means that now is the time to accelerate the translation of research into patient benefits.

The Mental Health Goals programme aims to address the significant unmet need for new treatment options for people with mental health conditions and establish the UK as the place to undertake innovative mental health research. By partnering with patients, industry and stakeholders across the healthcare system, the infrastructure developed through the programme will enable testing of new medicines, technologies, and therapies, and their acceleration to market, the NHS, and patients.

In May 2023, Professor Kathryn Abel and Professor Husseini Manji were appointed as Co-Chairs of the Mental Health Goals programme, with responsibility for setting the strategic direction, driving forward delivery, building stakeholder relationships, and representing the programme both nationally and internationally.

The Mental Health Mission (MHM) – part of the Mental Health Goals programme – was launched in May 2023, with funding to support innovation in mental health research, services, and digital technology. This £42.7 million investment in clinical research centres across the UK is being delivered through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration (MH-TRC) – a network of leading investigators specialising in mental health research.

The MHM is delivered under three broad themes:

  • Of the total investment, more than £20 million has been invested in establishing two demonstrator sites in the Midlands and Liverpool, dedicated to revolutionising mental health research by bringing patients and industry together in true partnership.

  • Linked to the MHM demonstrator sites, MH-TRC workstreams will bring together expertise in:

    • Early Psychosis: developing research infrastructure to facilitate earlier identification, treatment, and prevention of emerging psychosis.
    • Children and Young People’s Mental Health: developing the infrastructure and capacity for early phase studies for new treatments for children and adolescent mental health.
    • Data and Digital: enabling technologies to be used efficiently and consistently in the development and evaluation of new treatments through harnessing new forms of data and leveraging informatics for a trials platform.
    • Capacity Development: providing increased capacity and capability to conduct mental health research.
    • Mood Disorders: developing a network of mood disorder research clinics to run trials of treatments and studies in patients with difficult-to-treat depression. In November 2024, an additional £18 million was invested in an expansion of the network to include a total of 15 clinics in areas across the UK with the highest levels of depression.

  • A dedicated strategic and operational management team who support coordination and linking of activities across the initiative in partnership with external stakeholders including industry, regulatory authorities (e.g. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), NHS England, industry facing NIHR infrastructure and patient facing organisations.

In May 2024, the Mental Health Goals programme invested in DATAMIND – the Hub for Mental Health Informatics Research Development – to support with robust data and digital infrastructure. 

An Innovative Clinical Trials Hub was launched under the Goals programme in July 2024, to develop infrastructure for innovative clinical trials in the UK and create a collaborative partnership for industry to support the design and delivery of their innovative trials.

We are currently developing additional delivery plans for the Mental Health Goals programme, and will announce further details in due course.

Who we are

The Mental Health Goals programme is co-chaired by Professors Kathryn Abel and Husseini Manji.

Kathryn Abel, Co-Chair of the Mental Health Goals.

Kathryn M. Abel is Professor of Psychological Medicine and Director of the Centre for Women’s Mental Health at the University of Manchester. She is an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist for Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Trust where she is also co-Director of the GM Digital Research Unit. She has been at the forefront of delivering mental health research in NHS and academic settings to inform policy and practice and her work underpins important policy and service developments for women in services. She was the NIHR CRN National Speciality Lead for Mental Health for a decade delivering high quality research for NHS patients, is an NIHR Senior Investigator and a European Research Council Fellow. She is visiting Professor at the IoPPN.

Husseini Manji, Co-Chair of the Mental Health Goals.

Husseini Manji is a Professor at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Duke University. He was previously the Global Therapeutic Head for Neuroscience at Janssen Research & Development pharmaceutical companies, and Global Head, Science for Minds, at Johnson & Johnson. Before joining Johnson & Johnson, Dr Manji was Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Director of the NIH Mood and Anxiety Disorders Programme, the largest programme of its kind in the world.

Who we are working with

The MH-TRC is led by Chair Rachel Upthegrove (Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health at the University of Oxford) and Deputy Chair Jeremy Hall (Professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University).

DATAMIND is led by Co-Directors Ann John (Professor of Public Health and Psychiatry, Health Data Science at Swansea University) and Rob Stewart (Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Clinical Informatics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London).

The Innovative Clinical Trials Hub is led by Richard Emsley (Professor of Medical Statistics and Trials Methodology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London) and Mitul Mehta (Professor of Neuroimaging & Psychopharmacology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London), working with the MRC-NIHR Trials Methodology Research Partnership led by Paula Williamson (Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Liverpool).

As we formalise arrangements with other partners, we will update this page with their details.

Contact details

You can contact the Mental Health Goals by email: mentalhealthgoals@officeforlifesciences.gov.uk.

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