Mental Health and Wellbeing

Welcome to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Research Group

Our vision:  World-leading interdisciplinary research leading to a fuller understanding of the causes of mental disorders, with a view to improving population mental health and reducing health inequalities.

Our mission:  To provide robust evidence on the causes of mental disorders and to develop and evaluate innovative treatment approaches for individuals, their families and the broader population.

Our goals:

1. Investigating the impact and interaction of psychological, developmental, social, interpersonal, biological, genetic, environmental, lifestyle and health service factors on risk for mental disorder and population mental health.
2. Conducting clinical trials of therapeutic and complex interventions for individuals with complex mental health problems including research dedicated to understanding the psychological, social, interpersonal and biological mechanisms of therapeutic change.

Examples of the research activities of Mental Health and Wellbeing Research Group are:

• The development and evaluation of new psychosocial interventions for common and enduring mental disorders, with trials of therapeutic and complex interventions in adult mental health, disability and in parent-infant mental health.  These trials are underpinned by a programme of work aimed at the specification, measurement and validation of psychological, interpersonal and biological mechanisms of change.
• Our focus on epidemiology is charting trajectories to determine when, where and how to intervene but also has considerable experience and there is a strong culture of studying the life course and determinants of mental ill-health through prospective cohort studies.
• We also have excellent links to the NHS in Scotland (NHSS) and in particular the Scottish Mental Health Research Network and Clinical Research Facilities based in Glasgow and elsewhere.
• Our capacity to utilise and follow-up cohorts is internationally renowned.  We have access to Scotland's birth to death datasets of routinely collected data, we are home to Generation Scotland, and numerous MRC and other funded prospective cohort studies such as the Twenty-07 cohort, the 11-16 and 16+ studies, Peers and Levels of Stress, Determinants of Adolescent Social Wellbeing and Health, and the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s study.
• We host cohorts of adults with learning disabilities', adults with acquired brain injury, high-risk adults for psychosis and adults with first episode psychosis.
• Within the School, the Scottish Health Informatics Programme (SHIP:  www.scot-ship.ac.uk) supports an innovative mix of studies conducting health research using electronic patient records and major longitudinal cohort datasets.  We also host a programme of research on complex interventions in mental health so have a particular interest in complex health problems and in particular of schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorders and personality disorders.