Centre for Society and Mental Health

The ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health will bring about significant advancements in our understanding of how social, economic and cultural transformations affect mental health. Mental health is a priority for governments and policy makers, in areas ranging from economic productivity to community cohesion and individual wellbeing. It is also intrinsically social: the factors that promote mental health or lead to mental health problems lie in our societies, our schools, our workplaces, our communities, and in the nature of our contemporary social lives. The impacts of social contexts, inequalities, and experiences on mental health differ by social group and vary geographically. We are living through a period of rapid and far-reaching change, in our environments (physical, social, virtual), social organisation (including issues around urbanisation, cohesion, exclusion, marginalisation and disadvantage), technological change (and its impact on relationships and employment), and social policy in the contexts of education, work and welfare. Yet we do not know enough about which dimensions of our social, economic, cultural and personal lives affect our mental health, how, or by what means they might be modified. As such, we do not have evidence-based policies to address these challenges and to understand the nature and role of particular social and economic stressors on mental health, nor an understanding of the individual and social factors that enhance resilience. The Centre will bring together expertise across social science, epidemiology, psychiatry, neuroscience, patient and public involvement, and policy analysis, to ask: What are the consequences for mental health, positive and negative, of major contemporary social transformations? What social, economic and health policies can support improvements in individual and community resilience to mental health problems? We will pose, respond to and answer these and other key questions through coordinated programmes of theoretically-informed, empirically-evidenced, interdisciplinary research. These will be defined and delivered in partnership with affected communities, mental health service users, government departments, local authorities, schools and colleges, community organisations, mental health charities, and social and economic policy makers. We will collaborate with leading research groups working on these issues in other countries, and with existing UKRI-funded research infrastructure. We will evaluate existing interventions, apply novel concepts, and develop innovative methods for understanding the relationship between mental health and social experiences. The Centre will carry out programmes of research across three key areas where social, cultural and economic transformations have produced substantial challenges, and which could benefit from intervention: 1) rising mental health problems among young people; 2) increasingly unequal rates of mental health problems in disadvantaged communities; and 3) the negative effects on mental health of changes in the security of work and the provision of welfare. For each, we will seek to understand mental health trajectories (how problems develop over the life course), ecologies (how social and material environments influence outcomes), and vulnerabilities and resiliencies (why some individuals and groups in adverse social contexts experience mental health problems while others do not). Our research will identify the factors that amplify or attenuate the impact of social transformation on mental health, and the social, economic and health policies that can support mental health in individuals and populations. We will train a new generation of genuinely interdisciplinary social scientists equipped with the knowledge, the skills and commitments to help governments, policy makers and communities, not just to better support those with mental health problems, but to create mentally healthy societies for the future.