Notice

Mental Health Mission

Updated 16 October 2024

What we do

Mental health was identified as one of the key healthcare missions in the 2021 Life Sciences Vision. 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.

On 28 November 2022, the government launched the Mental Health Mission (MHM), with funding to support innovation in mental health research, services, and digital technology. On 25 May 2023, £42.7 million of investment in clinical research centres across the UK under the MHM was announced, to be 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 government also announced Professor Kathryn Abel and Professor Husseini Manji as co-Chairs of the Mission, who are responsible for setting the strategic direction, driving forward delivery, building stakeholder relationships, and representing the Mission both nationally and internationally.

The Mission 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 Mission will enable testing of new medicines, technologies, and therapies, and their acceleration to market, the NHS, and patients.

Phase 1 of the Mission is delivered under three broad themes through the NIHR MH-TRC.

• 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.

  • The new Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre (M-RIC) in Liverpool will help people look after their mental health by understanding how mental, physical, and social conditions interlink.
  • The new Mental Health Mission Midlands Translational Centre (MHMTC) will support research and the development of novel treatments for early intervention in psychosis, depression, and children.
    
    

• Linked to the 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.
  • Mood Disorders: developing a network of mood disorder research clinics to run trials of treatments and studies in patients with difficult-to-treat depression.
  • 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.
    
    

• The Mission is creating a dedicated strategic and operational management team who will coordinate and link MHM 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. The team will ensure commercial companies regard the UK as an ideal location in which mental health research and clinical trials can be conducted, and build UK-wide translational research infrastructure in mental health.

Phase 2 of the Mental Health Mission includes:

• enhancing the Phase 1 specialist Mood Disorder Clinics to open new sites and enable the Mission to respond to the known industry pipeline of technologies for depression and anxiety; and

• an expansion of DATAMIND – the Hub for Mental Health Informatics Research Development – to support the Mission with robust data and digital infrastructure.

We are currently developing additional delivery plans for Phase 2 and will announce further details in due course.

Who we are

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

Kathryn Abel Mental Health Mission Co-Chair.

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 is the NIHR CRN National Speciality Lead for Mental Health delivering high quality research for NHS patients, an NIHR Senior Investigator and a European Research Council Fellow.

Husseini Manji Mental Health Mission Co-Chair.

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 Birmingham) 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).

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

Further information and relevant links

• £42.7 million funding boost for mental health research.

• Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration.

• Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre.

• Mental Health Mission Midlands Translational Centre.

• Government to use Vaccine Taskforce model to tackle health challenges.

• Chancellor reveals life sciences growth package to fire up economy.

Contact details

You can contact the Mental Health Mission by email: mentalhealthmission@officeforlifesciences.gov.uk.