MQ Mental Health Research
Winner – From Systemic Challenge to Meaningful Change
About the Charity
MQ Mental Health Research (MQ) is the UK’s leading mental health research charity. Mental illness affects up to one in four of us, yet funding for this health crisis falls woefully short, with only £9 spent on research per person affected by mental illness. This is 25 times less than in cancer research. The MQ vision is to create a world where mental illnesses are understood, effectively treated, and eventually prevented. The charity does this by launching research into the detection, treatment, and prevention of mental illness while ensuring long-lasting impact. Since its inception in 2013, it has invested more than £23m into over 40 research projects worldwide..
Charity number: 1139916 | www.MQMentalHealth.org
Mental Health | England – London | 11-25 paid staff
What the Board Achieved
MQ Mental Health Research was one of many organisations that had to find a way to handle the challenges created by the pandemic as well as the changing landscape of the sector post-pandemic. COVID-19 shone a spotlight on mental health and, although it did not significantly change the nature of the landscape around mental illness, it substantially increased the scale of the problems the charity was trying to address.The relationship between mental illness and COVID-19 is bidirectional and complex: almost 1 in 5 people diagnosed with COVID-19 received a psychiatric diagnosis within the next three months, and 1 in 4 of them had no previous psychiatric diagnoses. Those who did have pre-existing mental illness were 65% more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19, pointing to underlying health inequalities for those with serious mental illness. Many of the pandemic public health policies involved measures that themselves are risk factors for mental illness. Loneliness is a major risk factor for mental illness, and lockdowns prevented many who live alone from having any regular social contact. COVID-19 also put a huge strain on economies, and economic downturns are associated with increasing rates of mental illness. The MQ board had to find a way to lead its charity through this sudden and seismic event and the aftermath, recognising that there would be both immediate and long-lasting impact on the charity’s cause and mission.
From November 2019 and in early 2020, a member of the MQ board filled in as interim CEO during a transition period as the founding CEO had left and the search for a new, permanent CEO was underway. The board acted decisively and continued the search for a new CEO virtually, while tackling the response of the charity to the pandemic and beyond.In March 2020, MQ met the challenge of the first Government lockdown by setting a new-normal of remote working and taking the necessary steps to support operations in the potential long-haul of the pandemic. The MQ board reacted quickly and decisively to support operations, but also took steps to ensure they were focusing on how the pandemic might affect the charity and those it existed to serve in the long-term. The board embraced its position as the UK’s leading mental health research charity and as a respected broker between the academic, public and third sector, realising that MQ had an opportunity to provide leadership across the sector. Led by the interim-CEO (and former trustee) Helen Munn OBE and board member (and Chair of the MQ Science Council) Prof Emily Holmes, the board moved to convene senior scientific leaders and people with lived experience of mental illness to swiftly lay out the research priorities for mental health in the pandemic.
Emily and Helen designed a rapid, but in-depth, priority-setting process that involved a stakeholder and public consultation. They then led an expert group to analyse the results and wider research landscape to develop the resulting position paper in the Lancet Psychiatry. The paper presented a road map and suggested a strategy for the funding and research communities to use in responding to the pandemic efficiently and effectively, enabling a relatively rapid response to the crisis. The position paper became the most-cited article published in Lancet Psychiatry that year and the following year.
It influenced some of the largest UK funders, including the Government’s Medical Research Council and UK Research and Innovation, to invest millions of pounds in mental health research through a set of consortium bids that came from the expert group convened by MQ .
In 2021, MQ built on this success by convening a larger, more diverse coalition to reflect on the evolving priorities. This included the Government’s Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Whitty, representatives from Department for Health and Social Care, and representatives with lived experience from the community. In 2022, MQ launched an ongoing commission with the Lancet Psychiatry, convening more than 40 diverse leaders in the field to continue to evaluate and promote the priorities.
Finally, this success helped the board to focus on the charity’s own investments and raise vital funds and continue to build upon its understanding of the impact of pandemic while evolving its own strategy to better support its community. This evolving support included a new app to support young people with anxiety in the pandemic as well as a study on brain fog in those affected by long-COVID that has already shown brain clots as a target for possible interventions.This latter study was funded by a transformational £500k gift from the Wolfson Foundation.
The leadership shown by the board, which responded boldly and decisively to the disarray caused by the pandemic, has had a long-term impact on the way the board approaches fresh challenges and had a lasting impact on how the charity approaches new strategic research themes. For instance, they followed a similar model in 2022-2023 to launch a new ‘Gone Too Soon’ research project, tackling the mental health challenges surrounding early mortality, and again to initiate preparations for a new research theme examining the potential solutions for the profound impact of the cost-of-living crisis on mental health. MQ is now recognised as a thought leader and trusted partner. This has helped to build sustainability in the mental health research sector, moving the needle to address the imbalance of funding. It has not only influenced the wider sector to invest more into mental health research, for example the upcoming £45m Office for Life Sciences Mental Health Mission, but also attracted funding for MQ’s own work, making 2022 the charity’s most successful year of fundraising ever.
