A staple activity for us as researchers, before we start any kind of fieldwork, is a literature search. This is to give us a clear picture of what research has been done before, what questions have been answered, and what we might productively explore. For this we use specialist search engines. It’s all fairly routine.
A few months ago, I sat with a colleague and watched him execute his carefully crafted search for examples of interdisciplinary research in mental health. It failed. He ran it again. And still it yielded almost nothing. ‘This can’t be right’, I said.
The National Institute for Health and Care Research had asked us to find examples of interdisciplinary mental health research. We combed numerous databases. Over a hundred papers came back. Almost none met our criteria. Yet, the work we sought to find was out there. We knew it was, because we had met the people doing it. But the systems we use to organise knowledge could not see it, or so it seemed.
That failure taught us more than success would have. Examples of research become more easily findable when it fits a specific category. A project that sits between psychology, anthropology and design fits none easily. And so interdisciplinary research can go unindexed and uncited. The lesson unsettled me. What counts as knowledge depends on how we agree to sort it. People made those categories. Institutions maintain them.
Why crossing borders matters
Mental distress does not manifest in ways that correspond to the neatly delineated boundaries held between academic disciplines and departments. People’s bodies, pasts and circumstances come together into individual lives. The causes of their distress are manifold and dynamic. The interventions are influenced by a myriad of societal, historical, clinical, and psychological factors. Yet the research meant to help them is split into silos, each with its own journals, methods and careers. The problems are complex. And the knowledge is fragmented. That mismatch has consequences.
Our report for NIHR, tells a different story through eight case studies. Consider Hearing the Voice, a ten-year project at Durham University. Theologians, English literature experts and philosophers worked with cognitive neuroscientists. Historians and linguists joined them, alongside people who hear voices. Together they reframed voice hearing. It stopped being a mere symptom. The experience emerged as something with meanings, histories and sometimes value. That shift changed clinical conversations and public understanding alike.
The pairings across the eight projects can be surprising. One Oxford network studies body-focused repetitive behaviours, such as skin picking and hair pulling. Dermatologists and evolutionary scientists work there beside psychiatrists. GALENOS, a global programme on anxiety, depression and psychosis, brings animal biologists into partnership with data scientists and medical researchers. Connecting Climate Minds asks climate scientists and geographers to think with psychiatrists about what a heating planet does to our minds. In ATTUNE, games designers and performing artists work alongside epidemiologists to trace how adverse childhood experiences shape young lives. Nobody sat these people together for decoration. Each team judged that the question demanded every one of them.
Or take SloMo, a digital therapy for paranoia developed at King’s College London. Therapists, designers and experts by experience built it side by side. An expert by experience who has worked on the project for over a decade, told us she felt safe to speak and confident of being heard. She called that validating. Read her words again. A person with experience of psychosis described a research project as a place of safety. That does not happen by accident. It happens through design, patience and respect.
What gets in the way
The barriers are not mysterious. Academic disciplines can behave like separate communities, or as one BIRES researcher put it, disciplines are cultures too. Each has its own language and learning another takes time. A colleague who worked on Hearing the Voice, told us the first year felt like learning to speak each other’s languages. And here lies the problem. Funders often count that year as delay. That is a mistake. The year of translation is a critical part of the work.
Careers form a second barrier. Young researchers join interdisciplinary projects with enthusiasm, then discover that jobs, promotions and grants still flow through single disciplines. Their adventurous CVs read as unfocused. Project leaders described researchers who came for the adventure but had to keep one foot in a home discipline to stay employable. The system punishes the behaviour it claims to want.
Money forms a third. Assessment panels – made up of academics who decide which research is funded and which is not – are built around established fields. A research proposal that draws on lived experience data or creative methods can confuse the process. Reviewers reach for the familiar. The unfamiliar is likely to go unfunded, and its absence then proves it was never needed. The circle closes.
None of this is a conspiracy. The arrangements were built for a different age of science. They persist because they reward those who already hold authority within them. We should notice who gets to define what rigour means and ask whose knowledge needs a chaperone before it enters the room. People with lived experience know this pattern well. Their expertise is often welcomed as testimony but doubted as evidence. This dynamic has been harmful for people with psychiatric diagnoses. Trust had to be built and naming that harm and that power difference was part of the building. Our report argues for a different view. Lived experience is a discipline, with its own skills, ethics and standards. It deserves respect and value, like any other.
The ask
Funders can act now. Three steps would help: fund the set-up time that integration demands, offer seed funding so unusual partnerships can form, and review assessment processes so unfamiliar methods get a fair hearing.
Academic leaders can act too. Promotion criteria could reward interdisciplinary work rather than penalise it. Institutions could sustain the partnerships that projects create, instead of letting them dissolve when the grant ends. Training could equip researchers, practitioners and experts by experience to work as equals. One researcher told us the treadmill of grants and papers leaves no time to sit with not knowing and form new relationships.
Mental health need is rising and budgets are tight. The public deserves research equal to the complexity of their lives, and no single discipline can deliver it. Sustainable answers will come from people who think together, across borders, with those who live the questions at the centre. Policy makers and academic leaders wrote the current rules, and there are examples of how they are being adapted and revised. It is time to rewrite them once and for all.
