Three quarters of all psychiatric disorders start in childhood and adolescence and a quarter of the total burden of mental ill-health in the UK is currently carried by children.
Services have limited availability and interventions often have limited effectiveness; autism spectrum disorder (ASD) alone costs the UK £27 billion annually. The ambition of our theme in child mental health and neurodevelopmental disorders is to reverse these statistics.
To optimise development and support mental health across the lifespan, our aims are to:
- drive innovation in the identification of mental health and neurodevelopmental difficulties;
- obtain a better understanding of the brain processes involved;
- improve assessment and monitoring;
- expand the repertoire of interventions available and their delivery.
We will harness the advances made in precision medicine to promote individualised care, and exploit informatics and digital tools to scale up assessment, intervention and monitoring in our clinics and research programmes.
