Addressing COVID-19’s social ‘side effects’
Inevitably, the public health crisis that led to numerous lockdowns and travel restrictions across the world has also had a severe impact on the mental health of people around the globe.
This means that mental health care has also had to step up to the challenge. One key way of doing this has, once again, been pushing for more interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration.
MNT spoke with Lea Milligan. He is the CEO of MQ Mental Health Research, which is a United Kingdom-based charity funding mental health research. Milligan told us more about the challenges and successes of collaboration across fields and specialisms during the pandemic.
“On the eve of the pandemic, the mental health research community had performed the great task of agreeing [on] a set of ambitious 10-year goals for 2020–2030,” he told us. “They derive from recommendations in the ‘Framework for Mental Health Research’ published in [December] 2017, and [they] also build on previous research priority exercises.”
Milligan explained that the agreed-upon goals for mental health research and care require cross-disciplinary collaboration from the get-go: “Research to support the targets under each goal should be undertaken in partnership with the life sciences industries, charities, the NHS [National Health Service], voluntary, social and independent healthcare sectors, together with patients/ service users, their families/carers and clinicians.”
This need for collaborative mental health research and care has increased exponentially due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he went on to point out:
“Coordination across the [mental health research] sector is essential for the tide to be turned and for mental health science to become the super discipline it has the potential to be. Substantial investment is needed in both human capacity and infrastructural capacity. The emergent umbrella discipline of mental health science needs [an] opportunity to convene, develop a common language, and explore opportunities for collaboration between different approaches.”
The good news is that collaboration is already happening. According to Milligan, “Over the [past] year, in response to the pandemic, we have seen many groundbreaking projects with experts from psychiatry, data science, [and] neuroscience and people with lived experience coming together to tackle some of the biggest challenges faced within mental health care.”
As an example, he mentioned DATAMIND. This is a U.K.-based “hub for mental health informatics research development,” which makes new tools and mental health-related data available to researchers from all disciplines who may benefit from using them.
He also mentioned the Post-hospitalisation COVID-19 Study, which aims to look at the long-term effects of COVID-19 — including those on mental health.
“This holistic approach has resulted in a far more in-depth understanding of the virus’s impact and has opened the door to further areas of research into the long-term cognitive effects [that] many [people] are reporting,” said Milligan.
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