Every other person will experience a mental health difficulty at some point in their life. The causes are complex, but treatment options are not – and in half of patients they just don’t work.
A new network of researchers at Cambridge aims to revolutionise mental healthcare by probing the processes underlying the symptoms.
With mental health issues projected to be one of the world’s biggest causes of ill health by 2030, there’s no time to lose.
Rebecca Lawson and Amy Milton are co-leads of a new mental health research network at the University, bringing together experts across disciplines to address the challenge from all angles.
The network will bring in people with experience of the mental health conditions being studied, so that their perspectives can inform research as ideas are being developed.
This ‘lived experience’ is considered so vital to making progress that Lawson worked with the University’s Bioscience Impact Team to develop new practical guidelines, and set up a funding scheme, to enable researchers across the network to incorporate the approach.
The aim is to turbocharge basic biomedical research like theirs, to drive a vastly improved approach to tackling mental health.
“I genuinely believe that we need a paradigm shift to make progress in mental health, and it feels like a tractable problem,” says Lawson, adding: “By taking a step back to focus on the basic science from this mechanistic angle, I think we can do this.”
Milton agrees:
Read more“With our whole network focused on the challenge from a huge diversity of perspectives, I genuinely think we can move towards a future of precision psychiatry and vastly improved treatment options.”
Posted on 09/10/2024
