Chair: Cathy Creswell

Mental health research is ripe for investment. Globally, only 4% of all research funding between 2015 and 2019 was spent on mental health research. Moreover, while anxiety and depression arise in adolescence, only one-third of investment into mental health research relates to young people, the vast majority of this from HIC, based on assumptions from these countries and scarcely translatable into other contexts. Only 4% of published mental health research originates from LMIC, where most of the world’s youth population resides.

The traditional translational research pathway, from basic research to human studies, to patients, to practice and lastly to wide populations takes around 17 years, and even longer to reach people in LMICs. While increasing the volume of financing is clearly part of the solution, there is a fundamental question about what are the most important areas to direct research for it to have global impact?