Mental Health Research Group

Understanding and addressing imbalance in mental health systems
Mount Edgcumbe folly with Drake's island and Plymouth beyond

Mental Health Research Group

Understanding and addressing imbalance in mental health systems
Title: Mental Health Research Group at the University of Plymouth
Funded by: NIHR 
Funding amount: £11 million
Location: UK 
Dates: 2026–2031
Project partners: Devon Partnerships NHS Trust; King's College London; Livewell Southwest; The McPin Foundation; NHS Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board; University of Exeter; The Zebra Collective CIC, Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust 
University of Plymouth PIs: Professor Richard Byng (PI), Dr Rebecca Hardwick (PI)
 

Overview

Our Mental Health Research Group (MHRG) brings together people with different skills and expertise to better understand how mental health support works in real life. By learning what works well, what does not, and why, we can carry out research that helps improve services and makes a real difference for the people who use them.
Across five connected projects, the Group looks at how mental health systems can work better. Instead of focusing only on individual treatments or single services, we look at the bigger picture. This means exploring how different parts of the system – including health and social care services and commissioners, community organisations and policymakers – work together to support people's mental health, and where things can sometimes get in the way.
Person walking down Union Street in Plymouth on a cloudy day

Our objectives

The MHRG aims to strengthen mental health research across the South West of England. By building skills, knowledge, and partnerships, we will carry out high-quality research that helps us understand how mental health systems work, where they are falling short, and how they can be improved.

Understanding imbalance MHRG
Understanding imbalance
We seek to generate further understanding about how and why mental health systems are out of balance – when services are under pressure, disconnected, or not meeting people's needs or recognising their strengths.
Rebalance for better outcomes
Rebalance for better outcomes
We will generate evidence about how mental health systems can become more balanced, joined-up and sustainable – improving the key outcomes of timely care experience, equity, workforce wellbeing and value.
See the bigger picture
See the bigger picture
We will explore how decisions about funding, staffing, service design and priorities affect the whole system, including where gaps, pressures and inequalities can emerge.
Inform better decisions
Inform better decisions
We will support services, organisations and communities to use research and shared learning to make more informed decisions about how mental health care is organised and delivered.
Build skills and leadership
Build skills and leadership
We will build the practical and analytical skills, the confidence and the leadership of researchers, practitioners, communities and people with lived experience to work together and improve mental health systems.
Work together always
Work together, always
We will make working alongside people with lived experience, practitioners and communities a normal and valued part of research and decision-making from start to finish.
Share and scale
Share and scale
We will develop practical tools, ways of working and learning that can be shared and adapted by other mental health systems locally, nationally and internationally. 
 

The five projects

The MHRG's first phase includes five connected projects. Together, they explore different challenges facing mental health systems while building the knowledge, skills and partnerships needed to improve them.

Mental health learning systems

This five-year project will develop and test new ways of using service data and people's experiences to help mental health services learn, improve, and respond more quickly. It will identify where services work well, where problems occur and how care can be improved.

Intellectual disability polypharmacy

This project looks at how people with intellectual disabilities can all access specialist expertise to support decision-making about medication. It aims to test an alternative model which shares psychiatrists' time more fairly and identify ways to make treatment safer, fairer, and better tailored to people's needs.

University mental health systems

This project explores how different parts of university life, including policies, support services, and everyday experiences, affect the mental health and wellbeing of students and staff. It will identify what helps create a healthier university environment and where improvements can be made at a systems level.

Community assets research

This project explores how communities, local groups and informal support networks help people stay mentally well, recover from mental illness, and prevent future problems. It will show how these community strengths can play a bigger role in mental health support.

Digital transdiagnostic app feasibility project

This project will explore whether people with mental health challenges, and those who support them, would be interested in a digital app that could help people better understand and manage their mental health, and share this with services to enhance continuity of care. If there is interest, we will apply for funding to develop a new mental health app.

Core concepts

System balance

Mental health systems can become out of balance when they are no longer meeting people's needs. This can lead to long waiting times, services that don't work well together, unequal access to care, staff feeling overwhelmed, and resources not being used as effectively as they could be.
Our research looks at how these challenges happen at every level of the system:
  • Across the whole system: how funding and resources are shared between different services and communities.
  • Between services: how people move through mental health care, from getting help for the first time to receiving ongoing support.
  • In everyday care: how day-to-day decisions and ways of working affect people's access to care, safety and experiences. 
We will explore practical ways to bring mental health systems back into balance. This includes making better use of resources, reducing delays and unnecessary processes, helping services work together more effectively, and making the most of community support and digital technology. By understanding what causes systems to become out of balance and what helps them work well, we can develop practical solutions that improve care for people, support staff and make better use of available resources.

Capacity building

Building skills and future leaders is a key part of the MHRG. We want to help people at every stage of their career develop the knowledge, confidence and leadership skills needed to improve mental health research and services. This includes mentoring, training, opportunities to learn from others, and support to become independent researchers and leaders.
We will strengthen mental health research across the University of Plymouth and beyond by developing expertise in areas such as systems thinking, using different types of research methods, analysing health data, understanding costs and value, sharing research in ways that make a difference, and working in partnership with people who have lived experience. Learning will be shared across researchers, healthcare staff, analysts, community partners, and people with lived experience, helping everyone develop new skills and work together to improve mental health systems.

Knowledge exchange and impact

Making a difference is at the heart of the MHRG. We want our research to lead to real improvements in mental health services, not just new knowledge. That's why we work closely with services, communities, and policymakers throughout our projects, sharing findings as we go so they can be used to improve care.
Key activities will include sharing practical resources for services and communities, delivering policy briefings, webinars, conference presentations, and writing blogs and academic publications. By working in partnership with the people who can use our findings, we will develop practical tools and recommendations that help improve mental health systems.
Through strong partnerships, shared learning and a focus on creating lasting change, the MHRG aims to improve mental health systems across the South West while sharing lessons that can benefit services across the UK and internationally.

Struggling communities and services

Mental health support is provided by many different services, including GPs, community services, hospitals, and voluntary organisations. These services aim to help people get the right care at the right time, but many are under increasing pressure. 
Long waiting times, difficulties accessing specialist support, unequal access to care, limited funding and increasing demand all make it harder for people to get the help they need. Staff are also facing growing workloads, stress, and burnout.
Meanwhile, policy leaders, commissioners and practitioners often don't recognise the resources individuals and communities bring to improving wellbeing. The mechanisms for integrating clinical pathways and community assets are poorly developed. Universities are experiencing similar challenges, with more students seeking mental health support and a growing need for joined-up approaches that bring together wellbeing, education, and support services.
As a result, many mental health systems are struggling to meet the needs of the people who rely on them. This can lead to harmful experiences, wasteful duplication, delays in getting help and worsening inequality.
 
 
 

How the programme of research addresses this challenge

Many approaches to improving mental health focus on individuals or single services. This programme takes a different approach by looking at the whole system and how the different parts work together.
As well as developing further understanding of the nature of system imbalance, our research will develop and test a set of key hypotheses about how systems can become more coherent, less harmful and wasteful and address the fundamental mechanisms underpinning workload–workforce mismatch.
The MHRG brings together experts from the University of Plymouth, the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (ARC South West), the University of Exeter, King's College London, the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre and the McPin Foundation. By combining a wide range of expertise, we can tackle complex challenges from different perspectives.
Working in partnership is central to everything we do. We work closely with people who have lived experience of mental health problems, community groups, voluntary organisations, healthcare providers, and the NHS. People with lived experience help shape every project, ensuring the research focuses on what matters most. Our close partnerships with organisations across the South West will also help us share findings quickly so they can be used to improve mental health services in practice.
Farmhouse on moorland

University of Plymouth MHRG team

Partnered with

Funded by

Advancing person-centred care

The Community and Primary Care Research Centre (CPCRC) is intensively research-active, delivering a wide range of community-based health services research projects underpinned by a highly developed research infrastructure.
Our research is conducted through the involvement of practitioners and the public, who are instrumental in helping to develop focused research questions and in designing projects.
We use a range of research methods (both qualitative and quantitative), to solve pressing and often complex research problems. Our research is often directed towards those individuals who are the most excluded or disempowered, have mental health problems and have difficulty accessing services.
Health carer holding hands of an elderly patient