Mental Health Platform Coordinating Centre

The mental health platform will advance the UK Research and Innovation 'securing better health, ageing and wellbeing' strategic priority, across all UKRI research councils, for mental health.

The platform will draw on expertise from multiple disciplines, including biological, social, computational and medical sciences, to address key challenges needed to advance our understanding of severe mental health and illness and inform more effective diagnosis, intervention and prevention. These challenges include heterogeneity within (and overlap across) diagnoses, poor mechanistic understanding of mental disorders, variability in measures used and a lack of objective biomarkers and a lack of diversity in consented research studies

The platform will accelerate understanding of the mechanisms and determinants of severe mental illness to identify early and best treatments, interventions and support. Cross cutting threads throughout the platform include: 1. data sharing and open science 2. in-depth understanding of those who experience severe mental illness

3. research into new markers and targets for intervention 4. exploratory studies in humans 5. harness, and enhance, the UK's rich data sources to tackle mental health research challenges 6. provide a basis for expanding capacity, partnerships and stakeholder engagement 7. focus research to tackle inequalities and benefit populations most in need

The mental health platform includes a network of investments comprising 5 mental health platform challenge-led hubs, the DATAMIND Mental Health Data Research UK Hub, a coordination centre led by a director, and activities supported through a collaboration and innovation fund to promote and incentivise collaboration across the hubs and with external partners. Future funding will be support early career researchers through fellowships through a separate competition that will also drive networking across the platform.

The coordination centre will be formed of the director and leadership team and will work closely with the leads of each of the mental health platform hubs. The director will assemble a team, which will include a project manager, communications and strategic engagement and administrative support.