Health Service and Population Research /

Centre for the Economics of Mental Health (CEMH)

The Centre for the Economics of Mental Health (CEMH) evaluates the economic effectiveness of an enormous number of treatments and services designed to help people with mental health problems. These evaluations inform mental health policy-making and the allocation of resources in the UK and in other countries. Many of the Centre’s studies involve the economic evaluation of mental health services and treatments as part of a randomised controlled trial and are undertaken in collaboration with other research groups both here at the IoP and at other institutions across the world. The CEMH also carries out costing studies and develops research tools.

The CEMH works in partnership with organisations in the private and voluntary sector as well as other universities. The research with which the Centre is involved covers the whole gamut of mental health problems – from disorders in childhood to mental illness associated with old age. Some of the Centre’s projects involve economic evaluations of treatments and services for non-mental health problems.

CEMH staff also work in an advisory role, helping others to develop skills. The Centre is, for example, helping researchers at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria to set up data-collection systems which will allow them to estimate costs of mental health services and build a new research programme.

Over the last decade, the CEMH has forged strong links with the University of Verona in Italy, helping the Section of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology there to develop research methods and working collaboratively with them on a number of studies.

The CEMH also has an advisory role with SEBoD (Socioeconomic Burden of Depression in Asia), an organisation launched by Norman Sartorius, former director of the World Health Organisation’s mental health division, to help raise awareness of depression in China and a number of other Asian countries and so improve access to the treatment and services that people need. SEBoD wants to educate doctors and policy-makers, reduce the stigma of mental illness and highlight the need for action.

The CEMH is headed by Professor Martin Knapp, an economist and policy analyst. As well as being Professor of Health Economics and Director of the CEMH at the IoP, he is Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) .

The PSSRU was set up at the University of Kent in 1974 and new branches opened at the LSE and at the University of Manchester in 1996. The PSSRU carries out independent research aimed at improving the equity and efficiency of social and health care by influencing policy, practice and theory.  The CEMH and the PSSRU carry out collaborative research and some projects transfer between the groups.

Professor Knapp has been working as a researcher and policy analyst in the field of mental health since the mid 1980s when he directed a programme that developed and evaluated the Care in the Community Initiative in England (which set out to help about 1,000 people move from long-term hospitals into the community).

He was elected as an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences in 2002.

Centre for the Economics of Mental Health
PO 24
Health Service and Population Research Department
David Goldberg Centre
Institute of Psychiatry
De Crespigny Park
London SE5 8AF

Administration:

Linda Parker

Phone: 020 7848 0198
Fax: 020 7848 7600