Lord Mayors get to choose a charity for the Lord Mayor’s Appeal. The chosen charity is supported on a ‘transformational project’ for three years; thus three are being supported at any one time. The Lord Mayor’s Appeal helps deserving causes across the capital and is generously supported by the City of London’s livery companies. The generosity of freemen and the livery companies, along with support from City A.M. and businesses for events like City Giving Day, provide the funding.
My choice for the Lord Mayor’s Appeal was the charity MQ Mental Health Research as one of our three chosen partner organisations. MQ’s founding supporter, the Wellcome Trust – based in London – is one of the world’s largest global health science foundations. Together, we approached mental health by putting science at its heart.
Last year, April 2023, we launched GALENOS – the Global Alliance for Living Evidence on Anxiety, Depression and Psychosis. The body aims to create a continuously updated open-access catalogue of the best scientific literature, allowing the mental health community to better identify the research questions that most urgently need to be answered and to speed up mental health research by two to three years. New treatments for mental illness are not simply an aspiration, they are a growing reality. This catalogue comprises a preprint service and an ontology. Here’s how that works.
Last night, we celebrated the end of GALENOS’s first year. Around 100,000 papers were processed by Professor Andrea Cipriani and the team at Oxford, about 70,000 human and 30,000 animal. Thus in the first year, things are well on their way to providing a useful map for researchers trying to connect, and test, the links between papers. Last night’s celebration at Mansion House had over 300 people supported by the Wellcome Trust. Naturally, there is a Knowledge Miles lecture on the subject:
This project wouldn’t have started had I not met the wonderful, and sadly deceased far too young, Lea Milligan on 1 September 2022. We challenged each other on why there was no mental health equivalent of arXiv.org, and GALENOS was the result less than eight months later. We miss you Lea.
As for my remarks on the night:
Ladies and Gentlemen.
It has been a pleasure to welcome you all to Mansion House this evening. For those who don’t know me, I’m Michael Mainelli, the 695th Lord Mayor of the City of London – a place I like to refer to as the world’s oldest democratic workers’ and residents’ cooperative.
Each Lord Mayor selects a theme for their term in office. My theme, ‘Connect To Prosper’, celebrates the ‘Knowledge Miles’ of our Square Mile, the ‘world’s coffee house’. While the City is, rightly, known for its financial and professional services, there are many other areas of expertise – or ‘Knowledge Miles’ – that we need to nurture and promote. Surrounded by 40 learned societies, 70 higher education institutions and 130 research institutes, the City is a centre for science as much as a centre for commerce: a message I put forward at the Science and Innovation Banquet here at Mansion House last week.
‘Connect To Prosper’ seeks to leverage those ‘Knowledge Miles’ – and the City’s many unique connections – to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the world today: one of which is, of course, mental health. A quarter of people in England will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year. And a fifth of people experience suicidal thoughts. Behind these statistics are real people who just want lead happy, healthy and fulfilling lives.
Tonight, we’ve heard how science is leading to a better understanding of mental health…and learned about innovative new interventions that could improve the lives of people experiencing mental illness. There’s no silver bullet for the mental health crisis facing the world today. But – in the spirit of ‘Connect To Prosper’ – if we can pull together and utilise the full breadth of our expertise, we can make a difference.
That’s why I chose MQ Mental Health Research as my partner charity for the Lord Mayor’s Appeal. And I’m delighted that, alongside the Wellcome Trust and Oxford University, we’ve launched GALENOS – a multimillion-pound project that is improving standards in mental health research. Meanwhile, the Lord Mayor’s Appeal’s This is Me initiative is changing attitudes towards mental health in the workplace and supporting organisations to create healthier and more inclusive workplace cultures.
Before I finish, I want to pay tribute to MQ Mental Health Research’s CEO, Lea Mulligan, who passed away in April following a sudden illness, and who I’m sure was known to many of you. Lea dedicated his life to helping others and his death is a tremendous loss to his loved ones and to the whole mental health community. GALENOS itself arose thanks to a discussion with him. Please can we raise a glass to Lea.
Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight, we’ve heard a rallying call to be part of the solution to the challenge of how best to support people with mental health problems. Everyone will leave with their own thoughts about how they can “invest in mental health”, but the true power will come from the difference we can make if we all move forward together.
So, please stay to pick up conversations with one another and exchange details. Thank you to the Wellcome Trust for organising this event and thank you all for coming. When we connect, we will prosper.