Advanced notice of future mental health funding calls: sharing the ‘bus timetable’

Since Wellcome announced plans to spend £16 billion over the next decade to advance scientific discovery and take on three of the greatest health challenges facing humanity, my team and I have been delighted to announce several specific mental health funding calls designed to advance our aim to find better ways to intervene early in anxiety, depression, and psychosis, including OCD, PTSD, bipolar, and schizophrenia.

These are in addition to the opportunities available via our rolling Discovery Research schemes - which are open to all health-relevant, curiosity-driven research and do not have to focus on anxiety, depression or psychosis. 

A key task of the mental health team at Wellcome is to design and optimise specific funding opportunities that we believe will help advance our mental health programme.  

This involves developing programmes that will generate the maximum range of new ideas and approaches, include a diverse field of researchers from around the world, target existing bottlenecks, and draws on the priorities and expertise of people with lived experience.  

Since agreeing our strategy, we’ve already launched three specific mental health funding calls that meet our criteria.  

These calls aim to:  

1. develop effective interventions to address cognitive impairments in psychosis 

2. help us understand more about how interventions work for depression and psychosis 

3. investigate changes in sleep and circadian function in relation to anxiety, depression, and psychosis to advance understanding and treatment. 

The most recent of these – on sleep, circadian rhythms, and mental health – is still open to applications. 

We’ve had a hugely positive response to these calls. However, we are aware that the more notice we can give potential applicants, the better they can plan for them.  

As one follower noted on Twitter: “Mental health funding at Wellcome is like buses…” We took this mean that you wait for months, and then they come all at once. So, in response, we’d like to share our bus timetable with you.  

These calls are still under development, and we do not yet have the full criteria available. As such, they are subject to change as is the exact timings of launch. With this caveat, however, we can reveal what we plan to launch over the next two years below:

Got ideas for other calls that with advance our strategy? Let us know about them via our suggestions box.  

Good luck!