Improving mental health outcomes for people in education, training and work

Expected Outcome

Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Deliver scalable and replicable integrated person-centred interventions on mental health included blended ones, in a manner that they are transferable to the new contexts in education, training and work, and studying and comparing their impacts;
• Deliver integrated person-centred interventions to all segments of population and age groups, with a particular focus for the youth with mental health conditions to improve their education, training and work trajectories, in order to ensure all these people’s inclusion into society;
• Provide relevant authorities, policy makers, key stakeholders and practitioners with viable tools to make evidence-based informed decisions for implementation to benefit mental health outcomes in education, training and work. This includes effectiveness studies as well as the delivery of data, including health economics data of the developed intervention(s) to further advance this policy area; and
• Provide quality evidence-based data to policy makers and research and innovation stakeholders to bridge the gap between mental health outcomes and related socio-economic transition.

Scope

In Europe, 84 million citizens ranging from the youth to ageing population of all socio-economic backgrounds of all genders, including vulnerable groups are suffering from various mental health issues in their everyday lives at home, at work, at school as well as in the virtual cyber-world. The mental health issues affect people in different ways and/or period(s) of their life course as well as the people who live, work and/or study in vicinity of these persons with mental health issues, and/or people who belong to their family, friends and/or social circuits.

The foundation of mental health is mostly laid in adolescence: half of all mental health conditions start by 14 years of age and most cases go undetected and untreated. The staggering figures show that the second leading cause for death of young people of 15-19 years is suicide after the road accidents.

Addressing and treating mental health conditions is therefore essential to improve the downstream impacts on education, training and work and future socio-economic outcomes. It also represents a long-term investment in public health.

Over the past years, many innovative solutions (supported EU Framework Programmes for research and Innovation and/or international, national, regional, and local initiatives) for tackling mental health problems have been developed. However, few interventions have been implemented at scale. There lacks evidence about the feasibility, acceptability and suitability of these mental health interventions at scale.

Building on innovative solutions supported by EU Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation and/or international, national, regional, and local initiatives, the challenges of the topic are:

• to significantly increase / scale-up the percentage of interventions that are actually used, and
• to involve families, individuals/communities, stakeholders and authorities, such as public services, civil society organisations in the development and implementation of interventions aimed at heterogeneous segments of population

Additional evidence is also needed about to which extend mental health interventions are actually cost-effective and cost-efficient – looking via various policy perspectives, e.g. education, training, working life, well-being and health. This would aid policy makers to decide on which one (or a combination) of the policy choices to use when weighing up policy choices in investment for education, training and work- related outcomes.

To ensure replicability, projects are required to specify clearly how they target primary prevention (benefitting an entire target group), and/ or secondary prevention (provided for vulnerable groups and individuals with existing mental health problems). The project design and implementation should clearly outline and justify who they are targeting with what types of interventions and in what type(s) of contexts.

Special attention should be paid to the visibility and communication of the research and innovation findings to direct beneficiaries of the intervention and their families, communities, wider publics and stakeholders from the start of the work.

Clustering and cooperation with other selected projects under this call and other relevant projects is strongly encouraged. Considering the complex design and implementation of these projects, it is expected that projects may take 4 years or more to deliver solid evidence for take-up by policy makers, practitioners and stakeholders, which also justifies an appropriate budget per project.

Where applicable, proposals should leverage the data and services available through European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud, as well as data from relevant Data Spaces. Particular efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of this topic is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable).