Far reaching Taboos

So today I took one of those online quick quizzes that test your knowledge of a subject in ten questions for mental health. http://www.oxfordmhf.org.uk/statistics.php Mental Health Statistics: Test your knowledge, and found I am a 5 out of 10 person but it made me wonder whether people in general would get even that many correct. This quiz did, in my opinion ask some pretty specific questions and I feel pretty convinced that people are really only going to know general answers. But really it is question 5 that got me to thinking

Mental health accounts for what percentage of the total spend in health research?

Correct answer: a) 5%

Around £74 million a year is spent on researching mental illness.

The Mental Health Foundation comments that, ‘for mental health research investment to match the impact mental illness has on people in terms of premature death and disability, we want to see this figure reach £200 million a year within the next 5 years’. Source: www.researchmentalhealth.org.uk/why-research-mental-health/

A mere 5% it seems such a paltry amount and it astounds me that more has not been done, especially given the quoted figure of

Mental illness causes 15 per cent of the country’s disease burden

At the very least I would expect the spend on research to be equal in percentage to the burden however it is not the case. It is the reasons why the money is not being spent that I am interested in and sadly I do not believe that I have an answer.

I can see several reasons why funding is not becoming available

·         lack of applications for grants

·         Lack of grants

·         Scientific rigor not withstanding scrutiny -poor experimental design

·         Ethical reasons based on the experiment design

It seems that this has been known for many years and this article from 2010 uses the same figures as above (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8711977.stm , Mental health research is 'incredibly underfunded' and also this http://www.fightingdepression.co.uk/uk-mental-health-research-is-severely-under-funded-says-professor UK Mental health research is severely under-funded says Professor)

I find it interesting that in 2011 another article was published http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_news&template=rr_2col&view=article&articleId=1076043 Heyday of mental health research approaching, say researchers.

The UK spends just 3.5 per cent of its health research budget on mental health, compared to 9.6 per cent in Australia and 7.1 per cent in the US, Graham Thornicroft, the head of Health Service and Population Research Department at the Institute of Psychiatry, said.

Which kind of suggest that the amount of money spent has lessened rather than increased?

I also found http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/campaigns/fairdeal/whatisfairdeal/funding.aspx The Royal College of Psychiatrists website they quote

Recent figures show that mental health research received 6.5% of the total research funding compared with 25% for research for cancer and15% for neurological diseases

Therefore it has been rather difficult to tell whether the actual figure spent on research has changed at all. I feel very much that it hasn’t although I haven’t been able to find figures to back that up. In many ways though the lack of funding may not be the biggest obstacle to good research being done in fact the article from 2011(http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_news&template=rr_2col&view=article&articleId=1076043) also mentions the great strides that a being made by organisations to rectify the situation and you can see on the royal colleges website that a new charity was set up in 2008 to generate funding for research http://www.mentalhealthresearchuk.org.uk/

However it seems that spending has not increased significantly.

The article from 2011 quotes:

Shitij Kapur, head of psychological medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, said the UK also faced a shortage of researchers and specialist practitioners

In real terms the lack of money available to researchers in the past may have led to many people to not enter this field of study and it could take years for this to change. In the mean time the media may well forget that this was ever a problem and the impetus behind campaigns to raise money could wane despite the desperate need for them.

It is up to us, the public to show our support for change and as with many other campaigns there is a way. In partnership with the research for mental health foundation and the institute of psychiatry are trying to raise awareness of the importance of research into mental health. You can show support for this here

http://www.researchmentalhealth.org.uk/