Introduction to Wellcome’s Mental Health Programme
Wellcome’s Mental Health Programme is a comprehensive initiative aimed at advancing research in mental health. This programme supports both basic and translational research to deepen our understanding of how various factors interact in conditions like anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Our goal is to improve both prediction and treatment methods through multidisciplinary approaches.
Key Areas of Funding
We fund a wide array of activities within the mental health field:
1. Understanding Interactions
Research is focused on how the brain, body, and environment interact in the development and resolution of mental health conditions. This includes disorders broadly defined to encompass obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder.
2. Predictive and Personalized Interventions
By improving methods to predict, identify, and group people based on their mental health needs, we aim to offer more timely and personalized interventions. These interventions could be pharmacological or non-pharmacological and may be provided through various systems including healthcare, workplaces, and educational organizations.
3. Field Building and Policy Work
We are committed to building a coherent mental health science agenda that integrates lived experiences. Our policy work aims to create demand for the development and implementation of new and improved mental health interventions globally.
Additional Principles and Restrictions
One of our core principles is meaningful involvement of those with lived experience of mental health conditions in our projects. We also stand against data colonialism and ensure research leads are based in the countries where data is sourced. However, we do not fund projects that don’t focus on anxiety, depression, or psychosis, or work on clinical service provision that doesn’t advance early intervention.
Available Funding Calls
We have launched several funding calls, including:
- Accelerating scalable digital mental health interventions
- Applying neuroscience to understand symptoms in mental health conditions
- Understanding how anxiety- and trauma-related problems develop and resolve
- Integrating sleep and circadian science into mental health treatment
- Improving cognitive and functional outcomes in people at risk of psychosis
We are dedicating £16 billion towards research and advocacy over the decade ending in 2032 to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. For more information on our broader grant funding, visit our website.
For more details visit https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/guidance/what-we-do-and-dont-fund-mental-health