Eight Mental Health Research Networks have been set up by UK Research and Innovation to bring researchers, charities and other organisations together to address important mental health research questions.

The Networks will embrace a collaborative ethos, bringing together researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including technology, health, medicine, biology, social sciences, humanities and environmental sciences. Many of the networks will also include insight from charity workers, health practitioners and people with lived experience of mental health problems.

We are called the Mental Health Impact and Engagement Co-ordination Team and this means we will support all of the eight networks to:

• Reach as many people as possible with their work
• Extend their reach across multiple disciplines
• Produce outputs that can be easily accessed and used
• Engage early career researchers and understand their needs
• Engage people with lived experience of mental health problems and their families to get involved with research.

Engage with funders of mental health research beyond the UKRI Research Councils to highlight the important and innovative work being done by the networks.

Mental health research is really important. We still know far too little about how to support people to maintain good mental health and wellbeing, and how to manage mental health problems.

The Mental Health Networks Impact and Engagement Co-ordination Team is led by Professor Elaine Fox from the University of Oxford and brings together people working in science communication, public involvement, academic research and open science.

We will use our skills to support each network – listening carefully to what they need with the goal of achieving better impact and engagement. A key objective is to increase cross-sector interest in mental health research. We want to encourage more people from many disciplines and perspectives to get involved in mental health science.

We firmly believe that together, we can achieve more.

We are still consulting on the exact details of how we will all work together and how we can best enhance the impact of the UKRI Mental Health Networks.

However, it will include the provision of training modules to facilitate the development of podcasts, videos, and webinars to provide impactful digital content to highlight different aspects of mental health research and why it matters.

We will run cross-network themed events on topics chosen by members of the networks.

We hope that our cross-network web-platform will become a focal point to find out what is going on across the eight mental health networks and a go-to location to discuss and debate why mental health research matters.