The UK is renowned for punching above its weight and changing the course of science and medicine. We intend to do it again.
In recent years, mental health diagnoses have rapidly expanded. Estimates of the size of the current burden in the UK vary with method, but all are huge: one major analysis puts the cost of mental ill-health to England at £300 billion a year — double the NHS budget; another approach estimates costs of 5% of UK GDP; official statistics count 22.1 million working days lost to work-related stress, depression and anxiety in a single year; disability claims for psychiatric conditions have doubled in six years; and the health-related welfare bill is forecast to pass £70 billion a year by the end of the decade.
Despite decades of effort and billions in funding, neuroscience and genetics have not delivered useful progress in understanding, treating or preventing mental disorder. The growing social problem is met by a complete lack of a promising scientific direction.
We believe the mental health sciences have been missing a core theoretical insight, one of this nation's great products: the evolutionary sciences.
Rather than simple diseases or "broken brains", most mental disorders are better understood as relating to evolutionarily adaptive human emotions and individual differences — traits that come with trade-offs, sometimes overshoot, or are misfitted to the modern world. Unlike evolutionary psychology, which is studied across the world and has decades of research, the field of 'evolutionary psychiatry', which focuses on mental disorder, is at a nascent stage. We believe it can transform how we understand, prevent and treat mental health problems — reducing disability and improving the world's happiness and productivity, starting with the UK.
The UK is already the global hub of clinicians and researchers in this field. The Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge, Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health hold the talent and the networks to develop an entirely new paradigm. We are connected with GPs and NHS clinicians keen to find new ways to reduce the mental healthcare burden.
What the field lacks is ignition funding, free of the shackles of slow-moving boards and university research bureaucracy. This is what the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health was established to circumvent. A proof of concept project will help us attract further philanthropic capital to the UK — nowhere else has this density of expert talent, dedicated young institutions and networks of clinicians. We are set on scaling tools that lift the whole population's mental health: the productivity of UK workplaces, the vibrancy of UK classrooms, and the efficacy of UK mental health services — tools we can then export, making the UK the hub of a revolution in global mental healthcare by applying the fundamental theory of biology developed here 150 years ago.
