What we do and don’t fund in mental health

This will include funding both basic and translational research to:  

• advance our understanding of how the brain, body, and environment interact in the course and resolution of anxiety, depression, and psychosis (broadly defined to include obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder)  
• find new and improved ways to predict, identify, and stratify groups of people so we can provide more timely and personalised interventions 
• find new and improved ways of intervening – whether pharmacological or non-pharmacological, provided via healthcare systems, or via other systems, such as societal structures, workplaces, or educational organisations, or undertaken by an individual themselves. 

We will also support the following activities:

• Field building to develop a coherent, focused, and shared mental health science agenda, and integrate lived experience expertise   
• Harmonisation of measures including use of a foundational set of self-report measures and analysis  
• Improved data resources, tools, and processes that address current challenges in mental health science  
• Policy work to help create national and international demand for the development and implementation of new and improved interventions.

We are committed to meaningfully involving those with lived experience of anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Within our mental health team, lived experience experts shape our governance, direction, decision-making, and daily work.

We expect lived experience experts to be involved in all projects and research that we fund as relevant. If lived experience experts are not required for a specific project, we will ask researchers to justify their decision to omit them. Collaboration must not be tokenistic or a tick-box exercise.  

We are anti-racist and against data colonialism – the practice of claiming ownership of data that is produced by others for others and appropriating the value from that data. As such, we make sure that research leads are based in the country where data is being sourced. 

We believe ground-breaking discoveries are more likely to occur in collaborations between a diverse range of people, so we are working with partners and the people we fund to support a thriving, inclusive research culture.  

We fund the full breadth of the diverse mental health science community, from a broad range of disciplines.  This includes, but is not limited to:

• psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists 
• science, technology, engineering and mathematics  
• humanities (for example, historians and ethicists) 
• epidemiologists
• lived experience experts
• clinical and allied health sciences 
• experimental medicine.

• Projects that do not focus on anxiety, depression, or psychosis (broadly defined to include obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) 
• Work on clinical service provision or reorganisation 
• Activity that does not advance early intervention. 

This remit applies to Mental Health specific funding.

The funding schemes in Discovery Research programme are open to applications relating to all mental health conditions.

We have several specific funding opportunities available for mental health researchers: