Our Research Challenges

In early 2019, we worked with YoungMinds & the Centre for Mental Health to hold priority setting workshops with young people, family members, practitioners, and policy makers to develop 4 research challenges.

The research challenges focus on improving mental health promotion, prevention, and early treatment in 4 key areas that we believe research across disciplines and sectors could help address. They have been at the heart of our work.

Below you can find out more about the individual challenges including the projects we have supported to try and address them. You can also read more about how we developed them.

The 4 Research Challenges

  • The Big Question
    How do we implement effective promotion of good mental health, prevention and early treatment for mental health problems at scale amongst children and young people?

  • Voices, Power & Attitudes
    How can we amplify young people’s voices and change societal attitudes in ways that positively impact on mental health?

  • Supporting the Supporters
    How can family members, friends and settings, such as schools, be better enabled to promote good mental health and prevent and overcome emerging mental health problems?

  • Embracing Complexity
    How can we best meet the needs of children and young people who have intersecting needs and face complex situations?
Image shows four petals. From top left clockwise: purple petal says "Embracing Complexity". Blue petal says "The big question". Orange petal says "Voices, power & attitudes". Pink petal says "Supporting the supporters".

Since agreeing these challenges, we have worked with young people, their families, and so many colleagues across sectors and disciplines to tackle them. We have focused on fostering and encouraging research collaborations through our regular newslettercross-sector placements, supporting Special Interest Research Groups, a targeted grants programme, and support for early career researchers through events, internships, and the GROW Researcher Development Programme

We have compiled a dedicated report (May 2023) on how we drew together our research challenges, the progress made towards them, and our perspective on what remains to be done. A summary poster is also available. We would love you to take a look!

Click the petals below to read more about each of the research challenges, and examples of projects we have supported to address them.

The Big Question

The Big Question

Voices, Power & Attitudes

Voices, Power & Attitudes

Supporting the Supporters

Supporting the Supporters

Embracing Complexity

Embracing Complexity

Developing Our Research Challenges

Between January and May 2019 our partners YoungMinds and the Centre for Mental Health convened stakeholder workshops to help develop research challenges for the Emerging Minds Network.

YoungMinds held a series of workshops for young people and family members with lived experience of mental health problems, and also sought the views of their experienced staff team. This generated a large number of pressing research questions which then informed a series of workshops for practitioners and policymakers convened by the Centre for Mental HealthThese brought together practitioners and policy makers from over 50 different organisations, ranging from Barnet Council to the Newcastle United Football Club Foundation.

The result was more than 200 research questions.  The Emerging Minds leadership team then began the tough task of drawing together themes amongst the questions and shaping the final research challenges.

We also drew on the extensive priority setting work led by the McPin FoundationMindTech’s Top 10 questions for digital technology in mental healthcare and and the findings of the 2017 NHS Digital Survey of young people’s mental health.

Below you will find links to the full reports from YoungMinds and the Centre for Mental Health summarising the findings from their workshops, as well as the criteria we used to make the final decision on what our research challenges would be.