Improvements needed in mental health research, says report

Policymakers must take steps to reduce the development time and cost of clinical trials of drugs for mental health diseases, and fund trials of prevention strategies, a report has said.

The report, written by experts before the World Innovation Summit for Health in Doha, Qatar, highlights the long development times and high costs of drug development, as well as a history of failures in tested treatments, as significant problems in tackling diseases in mental health.

The nature of such diseases necessitates long trials, but governments and funders should commit to spending at least 1 per cent of their country’s cost of care on R&D, the report says. More resources should also be put into trials of prevention and treatment methods and strategies, to assess their effectiveness.