Join Andrea Cipriani as he discusses how living evidence synthesis is transforming mental health research.
Thursday, 21 May 2026, 5pm to 6.30pm
Mental disorders are among the top 10 leading causes of health loss worldwide: in 2023, 15% of the world’s population experienced mental disorders and 17% of the total years lived with disability in the world were due to mental disorders. Anxiety, depression and psychosis rank as the most burdensome disorders across all age groups and locations, and 71% of this global burden could be avoided if all people with these disorders accessed optimal treatment.
Join Andrea Cipriani, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, in conversation with Alan Stein, Director of the Children and Climate Initiative, Blavatnik School of Government, as he discusses how living evidence synthesis is transforming mental health research and accelerating the development of more effective treatments.
In mental health science, there has been frustratingly slow process in developing new treatments, as well as in predicting which treatments will work for whom and in what contexts. To intervene early and deliver optimal care to patients, we need to understand the underlying mechanisms of mental health conditions, develop safe and effective interventions that target these mechanisms, and improve our capabilities in timely diagnosis and reliable prediction of symptom trajectories.
Better synthesis of existing evidence is one way to reduce waste and improve efficiency in research towards these ends. The Global Alliance for Living Evidence on aNxiety, depressiOn and pSychosis (GALENOS) is funded by Wellcome and tackles the challenges of mental health science research by cataloguing and evaluating the full spectrum of relevant scientific research including both human and preclinical studies in living systematic reviews. GALENOS also allows the mental health community—including patients, carers, clinicians, researchers, funders and policy makers—to better identify the research questions that most urgently need to be answered and accelerate discovery science into effective new interventions.
Illustrative examples from GALENOS and its new strategic collaboration with the Blavatnik School of Governance will be presented.
Speaker(s): Alan Stein (Blavatnik School of Government), Andrea Cipriani (University of Oxford)
Venue:
Blavatnik School of Government
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Blavatnik School of Government Radcliffe Observatory Quarter Oxford Oxfordshire OX2 6GG United Kingdom
Department: Blavatnik School of Government (Department)
Organiser: Blavatnik School of Government
Host: Blavatnik School of Government
Register here: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/global-innovation-mental-health