MHP Research Summit Hot Topic: Collaboration

On World Mental Health Day, PhD student Soumita Ramesh joined other researchers, clinicians, students, and people with lived experience of severe mental illness at the Playfair Library Hall in Edinburgh for the Metal Health Platform Research Summit. We asked her what everyone was talking about at the event.

The theme of “Collaboration” was truly at the forefront of the summit. 

I had the incredible opportunity to attend the UKRI Mental Health Platform (MHP) Research Summit 2025 in Edinburgh on World Mental Health Day. The summit was truly a delight for any academic as it brought together researchers, clinicians, and individuals with lived experience with the collective goal to advance our understanding and provide better treatment of severe mental illness (SMI). As a PhD student at the Brain and Genomics Hub, my research focuses on understanding the neurobiology of iron dysregulation and its clinical manifestation across psychosis spectrum disorders. 

Another interesting session was the AI and digital mental health panel. The presenters did not just highlight technical capabilities but also addressed the challenges in predictive modelling, and how public patient involvement can reduce research waste and improve the applicability of these models. 

Panellists also spoke about the importance of building safe, effective and trustworthy models that align and develop on current epidemiological understanding and clinical research practices. This showed me different ways in which we can pool in our expertise and datasets to create meaningful, precise and personalised treatments plans which improve the outcomes of people living with severe mental illnesses. 

Where Collaborations can flourish 

The Research Summit made me think about where mental health researchers are already collaborating, and where they can build new collaborations.

1. Integrative Models: Working with big data is a hot topic in psychiatry. The workshop and the sessions sparked conversations about how to harmonise data spanning across neuroimaging, genomics, electronic health records and real time digital phenotyping. As researchers, finding common frameworks and building a large dataset which is quality controlled breaks analytic silos and builds an invaluable resource for future researchers. 

   It was really nice to see how the field is adapting with the technological disruption that surrounds us. There was a real appetite for developing platforms and datasets in line with “FAIR” which is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data principles which are ready for the next generation of AI tools, with genuine inputs from experts, clinicians and people with lived experience. 

    

2. Mechanism meets Context: All the talks circled back to the central theme of bridging the gap between understanding of mechanistic pathways, such as proteomics, genomics and gene-level imaging, and a grasp of social determinants. 

    

3. Translational and Interdisciplinary Drug Discovery: Drug discovery in psychiatry has been a real challenge. A big part of this is the complex and heterogenous nature of the disorders and our lack of complete understanding of the underlying pathophysiology. The parallel session on “Reframing Priorities in Mental Health Drug Discovery” put forth an urgent need for systems that enable cross sector interdisciplinary co-design: scientists, industry partners, clinicians and PPIE groups to identify new actionable drug targets together. The rethinking of incentive structures to favour risk taking and integration of diverse datasets (including patient-derived cell models), shared phenotypes and thinking about what researchers can do now that is different from 10 years ago and how we can move from biology to chemistry marked a progressive, collaborative mindset.