This blog is written by MQ's Grants and Programmes manager Mariana Bolivar
Over seven years, the MQ Mental Health Science Summit has been a unique space for interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle the biggest challenges in mental health and mental health science.
The 2021 summit, delivered in partnership with Wellcome, was a particularly memorable one. Marked by the Covid-19 pandemic - both in format and substance - the summit brought together 370 people from 41 countries representing research, policy, practice, and lived experience.
The pandemic made us reflect more thoroughly and provocatively about mental health: What are we doing well and not so well? Why? How? With whom?
A lot to digest from these two days, now available on YouTube, but we have extracted five main takeaways to guide the way forward.
What are your takeaways? Share with the tag #MQScienceSummit
1 Lived experience is as valuable as other forms of expertise in mental health
2 “We need to focus on solutions, not only document our decay”
3 We must increase inter-sectoral collaboration
4 We need to improve inter-disciplinary collaboration
5 We need to seek out those we are missing
1 Lived experience is as valuable as other forms of expertise in mental health
This year’s summit brought the most notable integration of lived experience on events of its kind, setting a new standard in the sector. We were intentional in not having a lived experience person as a token, or to tick the box of representation.
There needs to be meaningful co-production with people with lived experience in every step of research, to guide efforts towards areas that can have the biggest impact. From the design of the research question to the dissemination of results.
But people with lived experience bring more to the table than their mental health struggles. They contribute with other personal and professional knowledge, and many become mental health researchers or practitioners themselves. For example, Michelle Crask explained the influence of her family experience on her research and Gareth Griffith highlighted the value of his background in geography.
2 “We need solutions, not only document our decay”.
This memorable phrase from James Downs summarises what Emily Holmes, Neha Shah and many others emphasised. Mental health science needs to connect with needs, demands and constraints in real life. Both at the individual and population levels, mental health science needs to make more efforts to bring improvements to people’s lives and communicate them effectively. People need to feel that it makes a difference, that there is hope.
At the individual level, the Active Ingredients commission of Wellcome, and Michelle Crask work offer promising advances towards personalised and effective treatments for adolescent depression, combining clinical, behavioural and cognitive strategies. Mental health is not only biomedical.
At the population level, the scenario seems less positive, but not hopeless. For over 30 years we have been documenting socioeconomic determinants of health (mental and physical), without many strategies on sight to address them. We cannot let this happen with the effects of the pandemic.
But there are reasons to be optimistic. The mental health science community has remarkably responded to the pandemic challenges. In record time researchers generated a sound body of evidence that sets a solid base for exchange and dialogue with those offering support at the frontline, who have produced equally valuable evidence and learnings.
We heard from Strong Minds and The Friendship Bench explaining how they worked to the best of their capacity, resources and knowledge to cope with needs in the pandemic. We saw interest in this exchange from researchers as well as service providers. But we need more mechanisms to allow this.
It’s not a case of choosing whether it is more important to understand or address a problem; the priority should always be articulating efforts for improving mental health outcomes in the population.
3 We must increase cross-sectoral collaboration
Despite recurrent calling for more coordination and collaboration, it is striking how often scientific evidence, practice and policy keep being misaligned. But structural issues, such as inequality and its effects on physical and mental health cannot be addressed by a single sector. As Jackie Dyer, Stephanie Hatch and others highlighted, addressing inequalities is very complex, but it cannot be just put under the carpet. We need to join forces to understand the depressogenic environment we're creating in our societies and how that differentially affects some people more than others.
The diversity of approaches showcased at the Summit clearly state that mental health is not just a biomedical issue. Mental wellbeing is built before birth, at the family, the school and the community as much as in the therapist office.
Advocacy and partnership-building are at the core of mental health science. Not only with the aim of persuading decision-making, but also to generate a bi-directional dialogue to identify successful strategies that can be scaled up, and address challenges more effectively. Cross-sectoral partnerships are also crucial to improve routinely collected data and unleash the power of data science for improving mental health.
But to allow this, funders need to provide sufficient resources to allow researchers to allocate efforts for partnership-building, advocacy and coproduction. If funding mechanisms don’t account for these needs in a way that is consistent with their importance, it will be difficult to see real-life action.
4 We need to improve inter-disciplinary collaboration
The need for more inter-sectoral and inter-disciplinarity was a recurrent theme in all sessions.
High specialisation has allowed great advancement in knowledge, but it cannot come at the price of fragmenting the mental health experience of a person to follow the structure of science and its numerous disciplines. Science should adapt to human needs, not the other way around.
Different disciplines and sectors need to come together and offer more holistic strategies that work in real life, where time, money, knowledge and even access to care are limited.
Interdisciplinarity is essential to account for the interplay between physical and mental health, as well as to personalise treatments. It is also critical to identify those interventions that have benefits over many areas, and therefore can be most cost-effective from the public health perspective. A great example of this is Golam Kandhakar’s MQ funded research indicating that reducing obesity and smoking and adolescence might have positive impacts both on cardiovascular health and depression. Two major global burdens of disease.
Funders, on their side, could generate incentives for this to happen, by prioritising integrated studies instead of single speciality studies, as Shahzad Malik observed.
5 We need to actively pursue those we are missing
Despite recent efforts to increase diversity and representation in research, there is still a long way to go for making mental health science truly inclusive.
Mental health research has been heavily dominated by high-income countries, which has undermined the evidence in other latitudes and strategies outside of the bio-medical agenda.
Valeria Mondelli, Dixon Chibanda and Golam Kandhakar highlighted the need to think more globally to achieve the greatest public health impact. But including low- and middle-income countries doesn’t just mean help them. There is a lot to learn from their experience and they are a great source of innovation.
There is also an urgent need to remove barriers for the inclusion of ethnic minorities and marginalized groups, who are underrepresented in mental health research, despite being among the populations most affected by intersectional inequality, less likely to receive quality support, and therefore, with worst mental health outcomes. Again, work with policymakers and other sectors is key, not only to include them in the sample but as active participants in the realisation of our collective vision of a healthier, happier world.
Missed the MQ Mental Health Science Summit? Catch it on our YouTube channel today.
