The State of Mental Health Science funding: first global baseline

The International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders (IAMHRF) report: The Inequities of Mental Health Research Funding. marks an important landmark.

This report gives us the clearest answers we have ever had to the questions: How much money is being spent on mental health science globally? Where is this money being spent? Who is the money being spent on?

Having answers to these questions is important because mental health science is important. It’s mental health science that will unlock our understanding of what works for whom and how. It’s mental health science that will drive the next generation of treatments.

The IAMHRF analysed over 75,000 research grants awarded by nearly 350 funders from over 35 countries, using the same methodology that underpinned MQ’s ‘UK Mental Health Research Funding 2014-2017’ report and the findings highlight a number of challenges we need to work together to solve:

Despite growing awareness of mental health in recent years, funding for mental health science has not increased: Global investments in mental health research have remained approximately $3.7 billion per year in real terms between 2015 and 2019, equating to roughly 50 cents per person per year

The majority of funding for mental health science comes from Governments, with little support from philanthropists or charities : 96.5% of funding comes from Government, with less than 2.6% from philanthropy and 1% from charities.

Only a very small proportion of mental health research funding is spent in low-middle income countries: Despite accounting for 84% of the worlds population only 2.4% of mental health research funding is spent on examining mental health in low and middle income countries.

The majority of funded mental health research is basic, rather than applied: 56% of funded mental health research is basic focussing for example biological underpinnings and neuroscience and only 17% is focussed on prevention, detection and treatment.

Most investment in mental health research funding is focused on adults, rather than young people or the elderly: 62% of research focuses on adults, compared with 33% on young people and 5% on the elderly

Many of these challenges relate to what we are trying to address via our work at Wellcome on the Mental Health Priority Area. We want to bring more funding to mental health from different sources, we want scalable global interventions including those that can have real impact in low resource settings, we want to weave currently siloed knowledge together and, crucially, we want to put young people with lived experience of mental health problems front and centre in setting a research agenda that seeks to answer the question of what works for whom in what contexts and why.

This report from IAMHRF is an important baseline. Now is the time for us to work together to ensure that mental health science is funded to a level where progress towards the next generation treatments is greatly accelerated and the benefits are felt in as many people’s lives as possible.  So that together we can move towards a world where no one is held back by mental health problems.