Mental Health Award: improving cognitive and functional outcomes in people experiencing, or at risk of, psychosis

This call will provide funding to individuals or teams from not-for-profit or commercial organisations for two types of applications. Firstly, to develop and evaluate interventions to improve cognitive and functional outcomes for people experiencing, or at risk of, psychosis. Secondly, to test new or existing markers of cognitive functioning for prediction of risk or treatment stratification.

Call at a glance 

This scheme is now closed

Lead applicant career stage:
Administering organisation location:
Anywhere in the world (apart from mainland China)
Funding amount:

Up to £3 million for applications developing interventions. Up to £1 million for studies testing markers of cognitive functioning.

Funding duration:

Up to 5 years for intervention development and evaluation. Up to 3 years for studies testing markers of cognitive functioning.

About this call 

As part of our strategic focus on mental health as a key global health challenge, we aim to enable early intervention for the most common and the most severe mental health conditions, in ways that reflect the priorities and needs of people experiencing them. This work includes developing and improving ways to predict, identify and intervene as early as possible for anxiety, depression and psychosis.

This call aims to improve cognitive and functional outcomes for people experiencing, or at risk of, psychosis, an area of unmet patient need.

Wellcome recently commissioned a review of interventions targeting cognitive impairment in psychosis. It highlighted that "cognitive impairments are a core feature of psychotic disorders and often appear well before the onset of full-threshold psychotic disorder. While psychotic and other psychiatric symptoms generally respond to medication and psychotherapy, cognitive impairments often interfere with full functional recovery, including the ability to achieve vocational success and independent living."

In this one-off call, we are looking to:

  • support the development and evaluation of interventions to improve cognitive and functional outcomes in people experiencing, or at risk of, psychosis, and  

  • increase our understanding of the potential for markers of cognitive functioning to enable risk or treatment stratification for people experiencing, or at risk of, psychosis.

Given Wellcome’s new strategic focus on mental health, we will be launching many other collaborative and multidisciplinary funding calls, focused on improving understanding and/or intervention. However, the focus of these future calls will likely differ from this one. We are very open to new ideas for developing future calls.

Eligibility and suitability 

What we offer 

How to apply 

Key dates 

You must submit your application by 17:00 (BST) on the deadline day. We don’t accept late applications. 

Open to new applications

  1. 20 April 2022, 13:30 BST

    Wellcome-hosted webinar on this call

  2. 5 May 2022, 17:00 BST

    Preliminary application deadline

  3. May 2022

    Shortlisting

  4. June 2022

    Full applications invited

  5. 4 August 2022, 17:00 BST

    Full application deadline

  6. September 2022

    Interviews

  7. September 2022

    Decision

Useful documents 

Contact us