NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre

Our BRC focuses on mental health and brain disorders, which can cause problems in all areas of life (e.g., school/college, work, relationships). Many people with these conditions do not get enough support and can experience negative attitudes from others.

Our BRC aims to improve lives by understanding how to prevent mental health difficulties and by finding new and better treatments.

As one of the world s leading centres of mental health research, it is crucial that we promote a strong, reliable, and fair research environment. In our work, we commit to: 1.

Keeping patients and the public at the heart of all we do; involving them in decisions about what we research and how we do it, as well as ensuring we meet their goals and expectations. 2.

Take equality, diversity, and inclusion into account in all aspects of our research; for example, promoting diversity in our study participants and researchers. 3.

Ensure that our science is reliable and accessible to our patients and the public, such as making our research data available for others to see/use. With input from patients and carers, we have four priorities for our future research: 1.

Whole person care - because people with mental disorders die too young, we will join up mental and physical health in every disorder we study. 2.

Precision psychiatry - because it is hard to know who will respond to treatment and who might not need treatment at all, we will develop tests to help guide treatment choice. 3.

Translational informatics - because healthcare collects a lot of data but does not use it very well, we will find ways to use data better to improve health outcomes. 4. New treatment approaches - which include new ways to improve symptoms of each disorder we study. We will have four disorder themes and five methods/platform themes.

The disorder themes will study mental health and brain disorders at all ages. We include virtually all mental disorders and some common physical symptoms, such as pain. Our methods and platform themes provide expertise and tools used across the disorder themes.

These include brain scans, genetic tests, and other clinical measures, along with data science and specialist statistical methods. We also provide support for developing new treatments and for testing them in clinical trials. Finally, we have a large group working on data to help support better clinical care.

In all our research we consider how new treatments, tests and data tools would be used in the real world. This means they must be affordable, available to many, and easy to roll out. This is especially important because of the pressures on the health service following the COVID-19 pandemic.