Mark Sladen, Veenu Gupta and David Woodhead
We need to understand the complexities of peoples’ lives to find solutions to mental health problems. Interdisciplinary research has the potential to achieve breakthroughs in areas of mental health and can complement established mental health scholarship by addressing complex questions that are difficult to engage with fully through any single discipline.
The Inquiry into interdisciplinary mental health research: lessons from eight case studies is a rapid review of interdisciplinary research practices in mental health, both in the UK and further afield, commissioned by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). It examines how the interaction of different disciplines, and knowledge and perspectives of people with lived experience of mental health problems, can create new solutions and respond to key challenges in the mental health sector.
The collaboration of medical and social sciences with the arts is one significant area of interdisciplinary research, in particular when engaging people with experience of trauma in research. For example, one of the case studies, ATTUNE bridges the sciences and humanities to investigate how adverse childhood experiences shape mental health, and has participatory, arts-based approaches at its centre. This project explored the lived experience of young people who have had highly stressful, and potentially traumatic events during childhood through formats that included animation, drama, music, photography, film, performance, and painting to understand what protects young people from being badly affected by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Outputs from the project included codesigning creative, youth-centred digital tools and community-led interventions to support resilience and meaningful change.
The review finds that interdisciplinary research is more likely to succeed if given sufficient time through the project. This requires effective leadership, since strategic focus can be more difficult to retain in a more prolonged and open process.
It calls for funders to go further in encouraging interdisciplinary research by widening expertise on funding panels to be more open to a broader range of methods, including creative and participatory approaches. The review also recommends that leaders of interdisciplinary research can further encourage this process by opening up opportunities to join interdisciplinary research and by giving creative methods a central place.
