Climate and Mental Health Award: Uncovering mechanisms between heat and mental health

To apply for this award, teams must bring together mental health and climate expertise as well as additional expertise as relevant. Consistent with our approach to mental health research, we expect research teams to include relevant lived experience of mental health problems, unless there is a strong justification for not doing so. We are open to any methods of involvement that teams choose. However, it is expected that lived experience expertise is involved in the most appropriate and ethical ways to inform multiple aspects and stages of the proposed research project.

Review our guidance on how to involve people with lived experience of mental health challenges in your research.

We expect proposed research projects to:

• focus on heat as a stressor of relevance to climate change
• focus on anxiety, depression and/or psychosis
• focus on mechanisms underpinning the relationship between heat and mental health
• consider and clearly describe the potential impact of the proposed project and how, if successful, it would contribute to translational work (either directly or over time) supporting real-world application
• include mental health expertise as well as climate expertise

We expect applications to:

• include relevant lived experience expertise of anxiety, depression and/or psychosis on the project team, unless there is a strong justification for not doing so
• appropriately reference evidence for the association between heat and the mental health outcome of choice
• focus on communities most affected by heat and/or mental health challenges
• propose methods that will uncover causal insights concerning the mechanisms underpinning the relationship between heat and mental health

Projects with human participants must use, as a minimum, one or more of our recommended common measures in mental health research in the collection of new data. Teams may also collect data using any other measure(s).

Your administering organisation can be a:

• higher education institution
• research institute
• non-academic healthcare organisation
• not-for-profit or non-governmental research organisation

Coapplicants and collaborators can be based at commercial organisations. 

Read about the different applicant roles at Wellcome.