The IAMHRF has released a new report analysing the global state of mental health research funding. We share our thoughts on their findings, and what we’d like to see in future analysis.
Vanessa Pinfold
A new report tracking mental health research funding investment 2014-2023 was launched last week to coincide with European Mental Health Awareness Week. It is an important read for our sector.
The Mental Health Research Funding: A Decade of Growth, Inequity, and What Comes Next report, from the International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders (IAMHRF), is wide-ranging – from percentage of funding allocated to research into youth mental health, to investment by mental health condition.
The headlines were:
- Globally funding increased from 2014-2020 before falling to pre-2014 amounts at $6 billion in 2023
- The US is a large mental health research funder but has reduced investment recently, explaining some of this trend – because in the UK, the European Union, and Australia, investment more than doubled in the latter half of the decade 2019-2023.
- Investment by mental health condition varied. Lowest ranked, with very low figures globally, was personality disorders (what we term complex emotions in our work). Outside the US, conditions receiving most funding were depression, anxiety and psychosis – the three areas covered by Wellcome, who invested £138 million in mental health priority areas in 2025 alone. Increased investment was also seen for self-harm, eating disorders, neurodevelopmental conditions and PTSD outside the US. However again this is skewed, and was not evident in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC).
- Most of the mental health research spend goes to the Global North. Researchers in LMICs received less than 1% of the global funding envelope. Plus, there is a concentration of this investment, with more flowing to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe than other nations.
- Often mental health research focuses on more than one condition – and that is shown in this data with studies exploring pairings of, for example, bipolar and schizophrenia; schizophrenia and psychosis; and suicide and self-harm.
- Investment in youth mental health outside the US shows some growth but globally is still only 17.5% of the total spend, which is not reflective of the population impacted across the globe.
You can’t unpick where mental health investments fall, as they will be in discovery science and cross-mission activities as well as those specifically tagged mental health.
How does mental health compare to other research funding?
Looking at some of these headlines more closely, it’s interesting to see how mental health compares to other research funding.
Campaigners and activists in the UK have been calling for more parity of esteem between mental health and physical health research funding for the past decade in the UK and elsewhere.
It is hard to make comparisons. Take Wellcome’s annual impact report for 2025 (see graphic); you can’t unpick where mental health investments fall, as they will be in discovery science and cross-mission activities as well as those specifically tagged mental health.
The IAMHRF report doesn’t make direct comparisons but the headline that we are falling back to 2014 levels globally suggests we are not achieving more parity but more likely less.
It also compares how other conditions are better at tracking spend and have systems set up to do so.
Call to action – what next?
In the report title the ‘what comes next’ section is a call to action. This is in two parts. First, address the gaps: look at the data and challenge ourselves to improve equity and growth in mental health research globally.
Second, create a monitoring system that tracks year by year spend, like cancer and Alzheimer’s research fields do. This is important but for the sector to really get behind mental health research it needs to see actionable change on the ground too. The implementation gaps have to be addressed in every country across the world.
At McPin, we are interested in the contribution of experts by experience to mental health research but the level of analysis here does not address this point, and the information is unlikely to be readily available anyway.
What would we like to see in future reports?
At McPin, we are interested in the contribution of experts by experience to mental health research but the level of analysis here does not address this point, and the information is unlikely to be readily available anyway.
There are a few things we would ideally like to see if a tracker system is set up to produce annual outputs. We would like to know:
- The types of methods used in these funded research projects and how far was this basic science, translational research, conceptual and theoretical work, data science (including epidemiological studies) applied research such as public mental health or health services research?
- Which disciplines are involved and how interdisciplinary the teams are?
- The involvement levels of lived experience partners in these grants – as co-applicants and as delivery partners
- What this funding is helping to achieve i.e. how much of this research is translated into practice
We know these are well beyond the scope of the current work. How the IAMHRF funded the current project was not clear.
To produce a global grant tracker system that has granular detail will need a sustainable system of funding itself; particularly if it’s to drive change in mental health research culture.
That is another call to action from the report authors: work with us to sustain this work so we can produce annual readouts, not occasional ones.
Within the UK-based Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders (AMHRF), which McPin co-chairs with MQ, our interest includes the UK data in this report.
Our focus will also be on the call for action – can we create a tracking system that does all the things we need it to do; for example, supporting the entire sector to self-organize better; closing the research-practice implementation gap; and developing research cultures that embrace knowledge co-production, including with lived experience partners?
Report limitations
It’s also important to note that this type of work always has limitations, as the authors acknowledge.
First, the methodology has changed since the last report in 2020, as the team have explored different ways to efficiently track changes in investment. An example of this change is that the current report draws upon 40 funders, while the report in 2020 had data from over 300.
At first glance this looks problematic but in reality 95% of spending in 2020 came from the 40 public funders named in the current report, so is less of a problem.
Second, the analysis by country is tagged to where the lead researcher is based, but the actual research might take place somewhere else.
A key area of interest is how mental health research is doing compared to other conditions – notably cancer and physical health conditions more broadly, but that is not covered and would be a different project.
Ultimately, we appreciate the methodological compromises the team will have made to put out this large and difficult piece of work, and thank them for the care and commitment taken to provide the sector with this report.
“I think the ‘compromises’ are really important signals of what we need to fix in terms of reporting in our sector, in order to create a richer, more comparable ‘map’ that we all can see. There’s so much to draw on from how other sectors have done it, so I’m feeling optimistic we can get there too!” – report author Raliza Stoyanova, in correspondence on LinkedIn
Vanessa Pinfold is McPin research director and co-founder.
