About UsMental Health Mission

Our focus

We focus on the whole 'spectrum' of mood disorders, including major depression and bipolar depression.

Depression often occurs with other problems such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress and interpersonal difficulties. It may also occur with physical health problems such as heart disease, chronic pain, diabetes and cancer.

In our work we aim to understand the processes leading to depression and other mood disorders so that we can maximise the effectiveness of therapies, treatments and services available to people with mood disorders.

How we work

We work in three overlapping areas:

• Understanding Psychological Processes (‘Understanding’)
  We do basic research to help us understand the psychological processes causing a person to develop and maintain a mood disorder. We also do applied research to help us understand how psychological therapies work.
• Designing and Improving Therapies (‘Translation’)
  We use the best evidence available to develop psychological therapies that will help people to become well. We want to develop psychological therapies that reduce people’s distress improve people’s chances of staying well and improve people’s quality of life, both in the short- and long-term.
• Improving Access (‘Access’)
  We want to improve “access” to the best evidence, the best research findings, the best therapies and the best models of delivering therapy. Improving access includes giving the best possible training to health professionals who work with people experiencing mood disorders.

All our work is based on partnership among staff in the Mood Disorders Centre, people with experience of mood disorders, health professionals and health service providers.

The Mood Disorders Centre  was selected in 2023, to be one of centres of excellence around the country collaborating on the £42m government funded Mental Health Mission (MHM).

Mental Health Missions aim is to increase the volume of mental health research being conducted in the UK. This will be done by providing training (CPD) and systems to support industry-led and NHS-led research and investment. The MHM will also focus on the areas of mental illness support that currently have an unmet patient need or carry a high burden.

The collaboration between the NHS and the University’s Department of Psychology, will work with other universities that are part of the MHM, including Oxford and Newcastle who are leading on the mood disorder workstream for the project. The Mood Disorders Centre will also work closely with our University colleagues in the NIHR School for Primary Care Research and NIHR Exeter Biomedical Research Centre.

Professor Barney Dunn, Professor of Clinical Psychology and co-lead of the MHM and AccEPT Clinic, based within the centre said:

“The Mood Disorders Centre has been conducting pioneering research around developing and evaluating mental health treatments for many years and has been able to offer life-changing therapy to people in the region thanks to our close working partnerships with the NHS Devon Integrated Care Board, Devon Partnership NHS Trust, and the Devon Mental Health Alliance.

“This new award will allow us to further expand and extend this remit, working with other national centres of excellence to help develop more effective treatment for conditions like anxiety, bipolar disorder, perinatal depression, and complex PTSD, allowing us to further establish ourselves as a regional centre of excellence and help regional NHS services innovate and enhance their mental health offerings.”

Professor Edward Watkins, Professor of Experimental and Applied Clinical Psychology and fellow co-lead for the MHM, added:

“Through this research and our partnerships, we have been able to develop evidence-based enhanced treatments for difficult-to-treat depression, including those that are now recommended by NICE such as rumination-focused CBT and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).

“This new project will enhance our ability to develop innovative psychological interventions, extend their dissemination and training, provide capacity for large-scale research trials and find ways to increase access to evidence-based treatment, especially for those who have historically been poorly served.”

The £42m funding – of which £465,000 will be awarded to Exeter – comes after the UK government, in its ‘Life Sciences Vision’ report, shared plans to make the United Kingdom the most attractive place in the world for Life Sciences innovation. To achieve this goal, the government is funding demonstrator sites in Birmingham and Liverpool as well as NIHR Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration (MH-TRC) national work streams, of which the Mood Disorders Centre at Exeter is a part.