Looking back to move forward: reflections on the strengths and challenges of the COVID-19 UK mental health research response

Abstract

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the swift response of mental health research funders and institutions, service providers, and academics enabled progress toward understanding the mental health consequences. Nevertheless, there remains an urgent need to understand the true extent of the short- and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, necessitating ongoing research. Although the speed with which mental health researchers have mobilized to respond to the pandemic so far is to be commended, there are valid concerns as to whether speed may have compromised the quality of our work. As the pandemic continues to evolve, we must take time to reflect on our initial research response and collectively consider how we can use this to strengthen ensuing COVID-19 mental health research and our response to future crises. Here, we offer our reflections as members of the UK mental health research community to discuss the continuing progress and persisting challenges of our COVID-19 response, which we hope can encourage reflection and discussion among the wider research community. We conclude that (1) Fragmentation in our infrastructure has challenged the efficient, effective and equitable deployment of resources, (2) In responding quickly, we may have overlooked the role of experts by experience, (3) Robust and open methods may have been compromised by speedy responses, and (4) This pandemic may exacerbate existing issues of inequality in our workforce.

Rights

© 2021 Demkowicz, Panayiotou, Parsons, Feltham, Arseneault, Ingram, Patalay, Edge, Pierce, Creswell, Victor, O'Connor and Qualter. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.622562

Repository URI

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/238365/