This month (October 2023) MQ Mental Health Research turned 10 years old. To celebrate our first decade we’re publishing our 10 Year Impact Report examining exactly how MQ have increased understanding of mental health by growing research talent, addressing inequalities, engaged people and invested in impact.
We also celebrated with an anniversary reception at the Royal College of Physicians in London with our board members, staff and other wonderful people involved in MQ’s journey,
MQ is an award-winning organisation that exclusively funds research into mental health conditions globally. By taking an impact-focused, multi-disciplinary approach, MQ researchers are helping to change the way we talk about, treat and prevent mental illnesses.
MQ is an impact-focused funder, meaning we do not only seek to grow knowledge. We work across sectors, including policy, industry, healthcare and beyond the MH sector, to ensure our research brings transformative effects to people’s mental health, and ultimately, that these improvements allow more people to thrive.
How Far Have We Come Come?
In the last 10 years conversations around mental health have shifted. A decade ago, the need to talk about mental health existed, for the betterment of our health in general. The goal for many mental health charities and the sector was to raise awareness, break down barriers to open and compassionate discussion of mental health, the associated conditions and mental illness.
In the past ten years, awareness has been raised but has awareness led to change? Change in our services, improvement to services, innovations in treatment, and crucially improvement in funding has not happened as much as our change in attitudes.
Research is the key to real, lasting, systemic change.
In the last 10 years, MQ has:
MQ has made great strides in improving our understanding of common mental illnesses, improving treatments and interventions and speeding up diagnosis.
But we are only just getting started. MQ are working hard to support researchers who are making a real impact, and improving the health of people with severe mental illnesses so that we can all live happier, healthier lives.
For example:
A new treatment for panic disorder
MQ researcher Dr Andrea Reinecke has developed a fast and effective treatment for anxiety and panic disorder. Andrea and her team successfully created a 1-session combined pharmacological-psychological treatment for anxiety disorders that is fast and effective in reducing panic attacks and anxiety symptoms.
Improving care for people with depression and HIV
In 2015, MQ supported Dr Ethel Nakimuli-Mpungu who was running a ground-breaking study that would change the lives of people living with both depression and HIV in remote regions of Uganda. Ethel developed a culturally sensitive group psychotherapy programme run by ley healthcare workers. Ethel was named one of the BBC’s most influential women in the world in 2020.
Predicting depression
The IDEA or Identifying Depression in Early Adolescence, project was an ambitious multi-national and multi-discipline project that aimed to better understand how cultural, social, biological and environmental factors lead to the development of depression in 10–24-year-olds across the UK, Brazil, Nepal, New Zealand and the USA. The project successfully developed a tool to predict which young people are at greatest risk of developing depression in later life. Helping vastly improve the chances of eradicating and preventing depression and anxiety in young people in the future
As outlined in our 10 Year Impact Report, mental health care had seen little innovation since the 1960s. To transform the landscape of mental health MQ needed to transform the world of mental health research.
MQ united researchers who were once siloed by creating the very concept of Mental Health Science. And like any superhero movie will teach us, we are stronger when part of a team. In the past, mental health research was fragmented from physical health and separated out into distinct disciplines. Fragmenting and separation create weaker parts. As with many things in our world, research is stronger when united.
MQ has created multi-disciplinary approach to mental health research. Not only from psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience but also everyone from anthropology to data science and involving clinicians and people living with mental illness. Our MQ expert meeting into psychological treatments, led to the first call for and umbrella mental health science a new cohesive, multidisciplinary, collaborative scientific discipline.
Yet So Far Still To Go
Looking back over the last 10 years, MQ has achieved so much and has come so far. From an idea born of one meeting of great minds yearning for solutions, to meeting the needs of both the science community and of the wider population.
Studies invested in early on in MQ’s timeline, back in 2013, have come to fruition either going on to improve public health policies, or develop innovative and effective treatments, or improve prevention and intervention approaches.
But there’s so much more to do.
85% of MQ researchers said more research and development will be needed before their research can benefit the wider world. This is why MQ must continue to grow, to ensure all researchers and their work can be propelled forward towards reaching their potential thus benefitting us all.
For research to reach its full potential, more funding is needed. For research to reach its full potential, MQ needs you.
MQ Needs You
Everything MQ has achieved in the last 10 years has been thanks to supporters like you.
MQ is ambitious, has developed all the tools we need, is on the precipice of the next phase of our potential as a charity and organisation. In the last 10 years we’ve gathered all that’s needed – a network of researchers, processes, and systems to support early career researchers to reach their fullest potential and those we support throughout their work.
As we enter our teenage years, MQ is ready to expand further, to reach our fullest potential and find solutions for the 1 in 4 people impacted by mental illnesses.
We have made an exciting impact in our first 10 years. But we can and must do more.
Find out more about the discoveries MQ researchers have made over the last 10-years and the wider impact of our work here.
The post Looking back to shape the future – 10 years of MQ first appeared on MQ Mental Health Research.