Mental disorder accounts for at least a fifth of UK disease burden due to a combination of high prevalence, early onset, and a broad range of associated impacts and inequalities.
Effective interventions exist to treat mental disorders, mitigate associated impacts, prevent mental disorders from arising, and promote wellbeing and resilience.
However, in the UK, only a minority of those with a mental disorder except psychosis receive treatment and far fewer receive interventions to prevent associated impacts.
Furthermore, there is negligible provision of interventions to prevent mental disorder or promote mental wellbeing and resilience.
The public mental health implementation gap results in population-scale preventable suffering, broad impacts and associated economic costs. The gap also breaches the right to health, reflects lack of parity and has further widened with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Public Mental Health Implementation Centre (PMHIC) aims to support improved implementation of evidence-based interventions to treat mental disorder, prevent mental disorders and associated impacts, and promote mental wellbeing and resilience. This will result in the sustainable and equitable reduction of the impacts of mental disorder and promotion of population mental wellbeing locally, nationally and internationally.
“The aim of the centre is to support improved implementation of evidence-based interventions to treat mental disorders, prevent associated impacts, prevent mental disorders, and promote mental wellbeing and resilience.”
- Prof. Steve Pilling, Academic and Strategic Director
Collaboration and leadership: Support collaboration and leadership on public mental health with many stakeholders.
Public mental health in psychiatry: Promote public mental health as an intrinsic part of psychiatry, and support College members to develop their knowledge and understanding of public mental health.
Education: Work with other professional groups to integrate public mental health training into their teaching programmes.
Evidence: Provide high-quality evidence, advice and recommendations on public mental health to government and other policy-making bodies at local and national levels.
Needs assessment: Support mental health needs assessment at national level to estimate size, impact and cost of implementation gap of effective public mental health interventions taking account of issues such as COVID-19. It will also support translation of needs assessments into improved implementation across populations.
Research: Support identification of public mental health research priorities, including implementation research, given the national and international implementation gap.
Since the centre was launched in 2022 we have published a set of publications focused on public mental health. Find out more below:
Public mental health implementation briefing
Public mental health and smoking
Summary of evidence of PMH interventions
PMHIC launch. Westminster, 2022
