Mental health charity urge increase in research funding

By The Press Association2nd April 2015News EnglandBusiness / Funding / Finance, Finance, Mental Health, News England, Research

Research into mental health receives less than 1% of the funding per patient that cancer gets, analysis by a charity has found.

For every £1 spent by the Government on mental health research, the general public donates just 0.3 pence, MQ: Transforming Mental Health, which describes itself as the UK’s first major mental health research charity, said.

The equivalent general public donation for cancer is £2.75, it added.

Its report said that while nearly a quarter (23%) of the UK population is affected by mental health problems at some point each year and the economic and social cost of mental illness in England is estimated at £105 billion, relatively little is still known about how to prevent, diagnose and treat mental illness.

The charity said that achieving parity of esteem between mental and physical health in care standards and public attitudes must include commitments to research.

Its report found that £9.75 is invested in research per person affected by mental illness, while for cancer research it is £1,571 per patient.

While £3.98 is spent on autism per person affected, just £1.55 is spent on depression, and 89 pence goes on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

For those with eating disorders or anxiety, less than 21 pence is spent on research per person affected.

In total, the UK spends an average £115 million a year on mental health research, the majority of which (85%) is from just three funders: the Wellcome Trust, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and the Medical Research Council (MRC).

MQ chief executive, Cynthia Joyce, said: “As our analysis shows, current levels of research are not fit-for-purpose. This means that advances are being held back in areas that could make a real difference to people’s lives, including the development of new treatments and opportunities to prevent mental illness in future generations.

“We are beginning to see important changes in our public dialogue about mental health, but any efforts to truly achieve parity of esteem will be held back without similar commitments to mental health research.”

Professor Roz Shafran, senior advisor to MQ and chairwoman of translational psychology at University College London (UCL), said: “This ground-breaking report highlights the scandal of under-investment in mental health research in general and psychological treatment in particular.

“Highlighting the gap between the paucity of research funding and enormous impact of mental health disorders is the first step in beginning to close it.”