What we do and don’t fund in mental health

We want to drive a transformative change in the ability to intervene as early as possible in the course of anxiety, depression and psychosis in ways prioritised by the people who experience them.

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What we fund 

Wellcome’s mental health programme funds both basic and translational research to:

  • advance our understanding of how the brain, body and environment interact in the course and resolution of anxiety, depression and psychosis (broadly defined to include obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder)
  • find new and improved ways to predict, identify and stratify groups of people so we can provide more timely and personalised interventions
  • find new and improved ways of intervening – whether pharmacological or non-pharmacological, provided through healthcare systems or other systems such as societal structures, workplaces, educational organisations, or undertaken by individuals themselves

We also support the following activities: 

  • field building to develop a coherent, focused and shared mental health science agenda that integrates lived experience expertise
  • establishing measures including the use of a foundational set of self-reporting measures and analysis
  • improved data resources, tools and processes that address current challenges in mental health science
  • policy work to help create national and international demand for the development and implementation of new and improved interventions

This applies to mental health specific funding calls at Wellcome.

Our funding schemes in Discovery Research are open to applications relating to all mental health conditions.

Who we fund 

We fund the full breadth of the diverse mental health science community from a broad range of disciplines.  This includes, but is not limited to:

  • psychiatrists, psychologists and social scientists 
  • science, technology, engineering and mathematics  
  • humanities (for example, historians and ethicists) 
  • epidemiologists
  • lived experience experts
  • clinical and allied health sciences 
  • experimental medicine

Principles of funding 

We are committed to meaningfully involving those with lived experience of anxiety, depression and psychosis. Within our mental health team, lived experience experts shape our governance, direction, decision-making and daily work.

We expect lived experience experts to be involved in all projects and research that we fund as relevant. If lived experience experts are not required for a specific project, we will ask researchers to justify their decision to omit them. Collaboration must not be tokenistic or a tick-box exercise.  

We are anti-racist and against data colonialism – the practice of claiming ownership of data that is produced by others for others and appropriating the value from that data. As such, we make sure that research leads are based in the country where data is being sourced.

We believe ground-breaking discoveries are more likely to occur in collaborations between a diverse range of people, so we are working with partners and the people we fund to support a thriving, inclusive research culture.

What we don't fund 

  • projects that do not focus on anxiety, depression, or psychosis (broadly defined to include obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) 
  • work on clinical service provision or reorganisation 
  • activity that does not advance early intervention

What funding calls have we launched? 

Find out what funding calls we can expect in the future.