Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what new initiatives have been launched to promote increased funding for research into mental health.

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is the largest United Kingdom funder of mental health research. The NIHR has already increased its investment in this field from £40.3 million in 2009-10 to £71.7 million in 2013-14.

NIHR funding for experimental medicine infrastructure is contractually committed for five years to March 2017. This includes £48.9 million for the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry.

Five NIHR research programmes are currently open to researcher-led funding applications within their respective remits, including applications in mental health:

- Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation;

- Health Services and Delivery Research;

- Health Technology Assessment (HTA);

- Public Health Research; and

- Research for Patient Benefit.

In addition, the HTA programme has issued current calls for research proposals on the following topics:

- improving the mental health of children and young people with long term conditions; and

- lithium or an antipsychotic as adjunctive therapy to an antidepressant for patients with treatment resistant depression.