Mental health in context: research, policy and practice

Joanne is co-Director of the Centre for Evaluation at NatCen, providing leadership on a broad range of evaluation approaches, focusing on theory-based evaluation. She is an experienced mixed-methods researcher with two decades of creating and using research-based knowledge to support public policy and practice development.

She is an accomplished leader of major research studies including quantitative and qualitative primary research, complex national programme evaluations, systematic reviews, national surveys, the Census and pilot development programmes for local providers. Joanne has wide-ranging topic expertise throughout the public health and wellbeing agenda, across practice and policy areas and the age-span and specialises in research utilisation in national public policy making. She is a skilled innovator and collaborator leading partnerships and consortia with a range of academic, statutory and voluntary sector organisations. Joanne is motivated by a passion to create knowledge through research that empowers people to call for, direct and create positive impact.

Mari is the Director of Health and Biomedical Surveys at NatCen. She leads a team of 18 researchers working on some of the most important health surveys in the country: Health Survey for England, National Diet and Nutrition Survey, Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey. She is responsible for quality assuring outputs from the team’s surveys to a National Statistics standard, designing new survey solutions for customers, winning new work and holding key client relationships. She has a particular interest in survey methodology and seeing through innovations on existing surveys

Mari has extensive experience of successfully managing complex social surveys across a variety of modes and topic areas. Before starting as a Director she led new business development at NatCen's Survey Research Centre and oversaw our web and telephone survey work.

Graham Morgan is a speaker, activist and worker in the world of mental health and mental illness. He has a diagnosis of Schizophrenia and has been on a CTO for the last 15 years. He has been working alongside his peers to raise their voice o issues affecting their lives for forty years, principally in the world of mental illness. He is also a writer, having written two well received memoirs about his life and contributing to magazines and journals such as the Lancet Psychiatry and the Journal of Mental Health and the Law. He has spoken at the United Nations Committee against torture and at many National, regional and some international events. He was awarded an MBE for services to mental health in 2008 and was made Service user contributor of the year by the Royal College of Psychiatrists as well as receiving the Andy Lawless award for changing attitudes to mental health. He was a member of the Millan Committee and the McManus review and most recently was Joint Vice Chair of the Scottish review of mental health legislation. He works for a Scottish Scrutiny Body and does a small amount of mentoring work for Glasgow University Psychology Dept. He is 62 and lives in Argyll with Wendy, her children and Dash the Dog.

Andy has been with Centre for Mental Health since 2002 and became Chief Executive in 2023. He has worked for more than 25 years in the voluntary sector, striving for equality and social justice through research, communicating evidence, influencing policy, and informing debate. Andy was the driving force behind the Commission for Equality in Mental Health, funded by the Elliott Simmons Charitable Trust, established to investigate inequalities in mental health. The Commission’s work culminated in a final report, Mental Health for All, which set out what a system for equality could look like across communities, local and national government. He is at the forefront of Equally Well UK, a collaborative to support the physical health of people with a mental illness. He played a pivotal role in facilitating the Local Authority Mental Health Challenge, which engaged elected members across the country in championing mental health at a local level.

Stephani joined King’s College London in December 2006 and leads the Health Inequalities Research Group, working across sectors, locally and nationally, to deliver interdisciplinary research on inequalities in mental health in marginalised communities and across health services with an emphasis on race at the intersection of other social identities. She has expertise in sociology and psychiatric epidemiology, using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to study the impact of discrimination, social adversity, social determinants over the life course on mental health and multimorbidity. Her work integrates collaborative and inclusive approaches to knowledge production, dissemination and action across capacity building, education and training, impact strategies and research. She holds local and national policy advisory roles across the health and social care sector and voluntary and community sector. Stephani has also been co-leading initiatives promoting and changing policies to insure the embeddedness of inclusive research culture, equality, diversity and inclusion at KCL since 2014.

Sally McManus is professor of social epidemiology at City St George's, University of London, where she directs the interdisciplinary Violence and Society Centre. She is deputy director of the UKRI VISION (Violence, Health and Society) consortium and is part of the teams delivering the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey and Mental Health of Children and Young people (MHCYP) survey series.

Dr Olumide Adisa is a leading expert in systemic change and complexity-informed approaches to tackling domestic abuse, violence against women and girls (VAWG), and associated health inequalities. At the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), she co-leads the refresh of the Mayor’s VAWG Strategy and the development of its accompanying delivery framework. She also serves as Commissioner for the VAWG Grassroots Fund (2023–2025). Olumide holds a dual role as Senior Research Fellow at the Violence and Society Centre, where she leads the Complex Systems Strand within the VISION Consortium. She is affiliated with the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City, University of London, and St George’s, University of London. In 2025, she was awarded a CECAN Fellowship to deliver a one-year project titled "A storytelling approach to developing a complexity-aware theory of change for violence prevention." Her work is driven by a deep commitment to inclusive knowledge production and exchange—bridging research, theory, evaluation, and policy to support system-level change. Olumide is widely recognised for her ability to help individuals and organisations navigate ‘messy’ policy and practice spaces. She brings a distinctive, adaptable lens to complex social issues, offering critical (re)thinking and practical pathways toward sustainable change. With a cross-disciplinary, engaged approach, she is particularly interested in making complexity principles more accessible within the violence and abuse sector—fostering inclusive, action-oriented communities of practice.

Professor Rory O'Connor completed his PhD at Queen's University Belfast in 1997 and then moved to Scotland where he has been ever since. He joined the University of Glasgow in July 2013 where he is Professor of Health Psychology, Director of the Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory and head of the Mental Health and Wellbeing group there. He is a registered health psychologist who is broadly interested in self-regulation processes and health outcomes. He is President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention and Past President of the International Academy for Suicide Research. In 2014 he was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2022. He also serves on the Scientific Review Board of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, is Joint Chief-Editor of Archives of Suicide Research, an Associate Editor of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior and also serves on the editorial board of Crisis. He is recipient of a number of awards, most recently of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's 2023 Research Award and the BPS 2022 Popular Science Book Award for When It Is Darkest. Why People Die By Suicide & What We Can Do To Prevent It. He has been named in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2022 list for individuals who "have published multiple highly cited papers, ranking in the top 1% by citations for field and year over the last decade". He is also Co-Chair of the Academic Advisory Group to the Scottish Government's National Suicide Prevention Leadership Group. He is also a Trustee of two mental health charities: MQ Mental Health Research (as well as being a member of MQ's Science Council) and the suicide prevention charity James' Place.

Sokratis is Director of Health Policy at NatCen. He is a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He has been responsible for the design and management of research projects, including national surveys, qualitative studies and systematic reviews and evaluations in the field of gambling harm, health risk profiles and epidemiology. 

He has managed the design of national evaluation projects related to the effectiveness of mental health, social services, and policy initiatives in the UK. This includes an evaluation of the Credit Card Ban for Gambling in Great Britain and evaluation of the Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise Covid-19 Emergency Funding Package on behalf of DCMS. 

Sokratis also led a project to improve understanding of how patterns of online play relate to the potential for gambling harm. This involved the collection of account-based data from several gambling operators. He led the chapter on mental health inequalities in the DHSC’s White Paper and has also reviewed large grants for ESRC and NIHR as well as academic publications for several journals.

Chris has over 20 years’ experience of working with Scottish mental health organisations. During that time, he has worked in front line services, peer support, service delivery, training, and research. For the last 10 years he has worked with the Mental Health Foundation (UK) as Citizenship and Participation Officer. Areas of interest include stigma, mental health disclosure, recovery, health inequalities, long term conditions and the intersect between emergency services and mental health in distress and crisis. Past experiences of mental health treatment, accessing services and living with a mental health condition have a big influence on his work. Now over 50, he has personal experiences of other long-term physical health conditions that have impacted on his life, some of which can partly be attributed to the complexities of how we manage physical health conditions while living with an enduring mental health condition. With social connection at the heart of his wellbeing, outside of work he prioritises family and friends, not taking himself seriously, and looking forward to Christmas “I spent so many Christmases in hospital or crisis, then in recovery, rather than have that time as an unavoidable trigger, I choose to embrace it and reclaim it as my own”.

Dhriti is a Senior Researcher in the Health and Biomedical surveys team. Since joining NatCen she has worked on a number of large-scale quantitative projects related to health including the Health Survey for England, Survey of Smoking, Drinking & Drug Use among Young People in England, Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey and the British Gambling Prevalence Study.

Dhriti is currently working on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing where she currently manages the nurse stage of the project. Day-to-day activities include questionnaire design and testing, development of survey materials and interviewer/nurse training.

Tamsin Ford is a Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the effectiveness of interventions and the efficiency of services in relation to the mental health of children and young people, with a particular focus on the interface between education and health systems. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London and she set up the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Research Group at Exeter Medical School in 2007. She moved to Cambridge in October 2019 where she is also an honorary consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. She became Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge in 2021 and is part of the Research Advisory Group of Place2Be, a third sector organisation providing mental health interventions and training to UK schools.

Franziska Marcheselli is a Research Director in the Health and Biomedical Surveys team at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).

She works on two large-scale quantitative projects relating to health; the Health Survey for England and the Mental Health of Children and Young People survey. She is particularly interested in health within society and mental health, and the factors that attribute to this.

Franziska graduated from the University of Southampton with a BSc in Applied Social Sciences. During university she conducted a research project that looked at the effects of social media on our emotions.

Kadra Abdinasir is the Associate Director for Policy at Centre for Mental Health, where she leads efforts to advance mental health equality across all stages of life. As part of her role, she oversees the team behind the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, a network of over 370 organisations hosted by the Centre. She has over a decade of experience in mental health and youth policy, research, and engagement. Kadra is a member of the NHS Race and Health Observatory’s mental health working group and serves as a Trustee for FORWARD UK and Race on the Agenda

Terry Brugha MB MD FRCPsych SFHEA Professor of Psychiatry University of Leicester and Consultant Psychiatrist Leicester trained in psychiatry and epidemiology at University College Dublin and at the Institute of Psychiatry and the MRC Social Psychiatry Unit Kings College London where he was mentored by John and Lorna Wing. His achievements include the development of the world's most widely used measure of stressful life events the List of Threatening Experiences and the completion of the world's first national adult general population programme of surveys of the epidemiology of autism spectrum disorder in adulthood and in old age. He leads a long term programme of clinical trials on the prevention of perinatal depression. Terry is also the chair of the WHO advisory committee on the Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) which is developing a revised SCAN (version 3) incorporating autism and ADHD. He has served as Secretary General of the International Federation of Psychiatric Epidemiology and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Navneet Kapur is Professor of Psychiatry and Population Health at the University of Manchester, UK and an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. He is also Director of the UK’s National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health Services. He has spent the last thirty years researching suicidal behaviour, particularly its causes, treatment and prevention. He has led committees for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) including those developing guidelines for how all clinical staff should help people after self-harm. He sits on the main advisory group on suicide prevention for the Department of Health in England and leads national quality improvement work to prevent suicide. He is the lead author of Suicide Prevention (3rd Edition, Oxford University Press) and has published over 400 academic papers. Nav is the recipient of both the American Association of Suicidology Louis I. Dublin Award for lifetime achievement in suicide prevention and the International Association of Suicide Prevention Stengel Award for outstanding research.

Claudia Cooper is a Professor of Psychological Medicine at the Wolfson Institute of Population Health and a consultant old age psychiatrist at East London NHS Foundation Trust memory services. She led the NIHR/ESRC APPLE-Tree programme (2018-2024), investigating how lifestyle and behavioural change can prevent dementia in older people. She co-leads the NIHR Dementia and Neurodegenerative Diseases Policy Research Unit (Queen Mary) alongside Prof. Sube Banerjee, and the Alzheimer’s Society Integrated Care Doctoral Training Programme with Prof. Nathan Davies. Cooper is a member of the UK Cabinet Office Evaluation Task Force Advice Panel and holds the position of NIHR Senior Investigator.

Anastasia is a Research Fellow at the Violence and Society Centre. She has been exploring how violence is presented within health data with a particular focus on Public Health Wales dataset. Anastasia has research experience in public health, social epidemiology, medicine, and health psychology with the emphasis on health determinants, mental health, and health behaviours. Her doctoral research explored the predictors of positive retirement adjustment and ways to promote well-being and physical activity during retirement transition. She previously worked at the Northern Hub for Veterans and Military Families Research at Northumbria University researching the distribution, patterns, and determinants of physical and mental health in the UK veterans’ cohort.

Peter is the Director for Equity, Inclusion, and Involvement with Rethink Mental Illness, a leading national mental health charity working to help those affected by severe mental illness. Peter’s role focuses on EDI and involvement strategies. Prior to joining Rethink Mental Illness in 2022, Peter spent nearly two decades in the Civil Service at the Home Office, where held senior policy, HR, and EDI roles. He also undertook a secondment at the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) where he led on the overhaul of the MPS’s internal grievance and discrimination complaints procedure following an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. In the latter part of his Civil Service career, Peter worked on the assessments for the Windrush Compensation Scheme and the Windrush Scheme in supporting the review by Wendy Williams CBE into the Home Office’s progress on implementing the 30 recommendations in her Windrush Lessons Learned Review of the Windrush scandal. Peter is a qualified Barrister (unregistered) and Attorney-at-Law (Barbados) and a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. He is a mentor with the Patchwork Foundation, a member of Sport England’s Diversity in Sports Leadership Network, and an avid cricket, boxing, and Arsenal fan.

Lucy has over 15 years’ experience in achieving change through policy, influencing and partnerships. She oversees the department responsible for working with Government and policy makers to influence national policy change in mental health and then partnering with health and care organisations to ensure change is delivered on the ground. The team work in partnership with people with lived experience to test out new ways of supporting people and then feed the evidence from innovation back into our national influencing. Lucy has a background of successful influencing of Government Acts, budgets and policy direction having worked in policy, public affairs and campaigning at other charities. She also has 5 years’ experience as a lived experience expert on NHS England’s National Diabetes Audit Board.

Joanne is co-Director of the Centre for Evaluation at NatCen, providing leadership on a broad range of evaluation approaches, focusing on theory-based evaluation. She is an experienced mixed-methods researcher with two decades of creating and using research-based knowledge to support public policy and practice development.

She is an accomplished leader of major research studies including quantitative and qualitative primary research, complex national programme evaluations, systematic reviews, national surveys, the Census and pilot development programmes for local providers. Joanne has wide-ranging topic expertise throughout the public health and wellbeing agenda, across practice and policy areas and the age-span and specialises in research utilisation in national public policy making. She is a skilled innovator and collaborator leading partnerships and consortia with a range of academic, statutory and voluntary sector organisations. Joanne is motivated by a passion to create knowledge through research that empowers people to call for, direct and create positive impact.