The National Centre for Mental Health (NCMH), a NISCHR-funded research centre, has opened a consultation on future mental health research priorities for Wales. For more information, and instructions on how to make a contribution, follow this link. I see the NCMH is also planning a live Twitter discussion on Thursday August 21st 2014, between 7pm and 8pm. The hashtag pulling all of this together is #TellNCMH.

Here are my priorities, as submitted this morning:

• How do we make mental health services more person-centred and collaborative, particularly at a time of financial constraint and cuts to public services?
• What do service users need to promote recovery, and how can services be organised and provided in ways which reflect this?
• What is shared decision-making in mental health, what are its effects, and what can be done to improve it?
• New roles in mental health, including peer support: what is the impact on users, workers and organisations?
• Understanding and improving the experiences of organising, providing and receiving mental health care across system interfaces (eg, transitions from home to community crisis services, or community crisis services to inpatient care, or from hospital to home, or from community CAMHS to inpatient CAMHS, or from 18-65 to older people’s services, or across interprofessional interfaces, etc).

In my response I made the additional point that parity of esteem means investing in mental health services and also in mental health research (see my recent post here). More generally, I suggested we need research into the causes of mental ill-health and distress and into actions and interventions (physical, psychological, social) which help, and research into the experiences of people receiving and working in services, and research into the organisation and delivery of services.

• Mental health
• Research