The Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) recent webinar on the cross-council mental health agenda, published on 17 August, gave some extra insight into the importance that the UK’s research councils are placing on mental health.
Introducing the mental health agenda, the research councils stress that they are not trying to address the full scope of what is a broad field of research. Instead, they say they seek to “highlight some areas where researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds might work together”. Through articulating the research areas in a cross-disciplinary way, they hope to expand research to be inclusive of other disciplines.
The councils are ready to support more sustained and cross-disciplinary research on mental health, but they have nonetheless decided not to include neurodegenerative disorders in their agenda as these are “funded through alternative routes”. On the other hand, they are particularly keen to promote research in “areas where high quality cross-disciplinary research could add the most value and impact…through novel and transformative research”.
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