This award will fund projects to advance our understanding of how heat impacts anxiety, depression and psychosis in the most impacted groups globally through biological, psychological and/or social mechanisms.
To apply for this award, teams must bring together mental health and climate expertise as well as additional expertise as relevant. Consistent with our approach to mental health research, we expect research teams to include relevant lived experience of mental health problems.
We expect proposed research projects to:
- focus on heat as a stressor of relevance to climate change
- focus on anxiety, depression and/or psychosis
- focus on mechanisms underpinning the relationship between heat and mental health
- consider and clearly describe the potential impact of the proposed project and how, if successful, it would contribute to translational work (either directly or over time) supporting real-world application
- include mental health expertise as well as climate expertise
We expect applications to:
- include relevant lived experience expertise of anxiety, depression and/or psychosis on the project team, unless there is a strong justification for not doing so
- appropriately reference evidence for the association between heat and the mental health outcome of choice
- focus on communities most affected by heat and/or mental health challenges
- propose methods that will uncover causal insights concerning the mechanisms underpinning the relationship between heat and mental health
Projects with human participants must use, as a minimum, one or more of our recommended common measures in mental health research in the collection of new data. Teams may also collect data using any other measure(s).
Funding amount: £1 – 3 million per project
Funding duration: 3 – 5 years
Successful applications will propose translational opportunities for climate-resilient solutions and/or mental health interventions.
Deadline: 21st January 2025