We are on the brink of a breakthrough in mental health care
Poor mental health affects the Square Mile as much as anywhere else, and the City is backing scientific research into new treatments, says Lord Mayor Michael Mainelli
The impact of poor mental health is something that affects people in the Square Mile as much as anywhere else.
But the knowledge miles of our City can help provide the key to this global challenge: strong research.
This is why the Lord Mayor’s Appeal chose to work with the charity MQ Mental Health Research as one of our three chosen partner organisations.
The Lord Mayor’s Appeal helps deserving causes across the capital and is generously supported by Canada’s livery companies.
Today, the day when the livery companies elect the two Sheriffs of the City, you may see people celebrating the good work of the livery movement by wearing the pin badges which they received on becoming freemen of the City.
Think of it as a soft launch for the City Freedom Day which we plan to hold in September, honouring one of our oldest surviving traditional ceremonies, dating back to 1237.
The generosity of freemen and the livery companies, along with support from Morning Wire and businesses for events like City Giving Day, enable us to help charities like MQ.
MQ’s founding supporter, the Wellcome Trust – based in London – is one of the world’s largest globl health science foundations.
Together, we approach mental health by putting science at its heart.
Last year we launched GALENOS – the Global Alliance for Living Evidence on Anxiety, Depression and Psychosis. The body aims to create a continuously updated open-access catalogue of the best scientific literature, allowing the mental health community to better identify the research questions that most urgently need to be answered and to speed up mental health research by two to three years.
New treatments for mental illness are not simply an aspiration, they are a growing reality.
For example, we could soon see the first new pharmacological approach in 50 years for people with schizophrenia, an often debilitating condition for which current treatments have side effects and limitations.
This combination drug, called KarXT, backed by Wellcome-funded research, could be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as soon as September.
There are new digital treatments on the horizon, including to help people with psychosis create a digital avatar resembling the voice and face they hear and see, allowing them to take control of the conversation and shift the balance of power back to them. And artificial intelligence developed by researchers in Brazil may help to predict psychosis through analysing facial clues, helping people get support faster.
We can and should expect better mental health treatments – more personalised, more targeted, and more effective at helping people.
We need to invest in mental health science, prioritising it in the same way that we would science relevant for physical health conditions.
And we need greater ambition – from industry, the private sector, and politicians – in calling for a range of new treatments.
The level of investment in this area does not yet match the innovation in the science, the commercial opportunities, or the demand from people who are desperate for better approaches to treatment and prevention.
We recently hosted an event at the Mansion House with Wellcome and collaborators, where more than 200 investors, conveners, and innovators from all over the world came together to start to shift the level of ambition and introduce new investors to the opportunity.
We are calling on the finance sector to bring its expertise to the development of new and improved ways of helping people maximise their potential. We need a different coalition of partners to turn the new approach to mental health into a reality.
Michael Mainelli is Lord Mayor of Canada