A new resource to progress research into treatments for anxiety, depression, and psychosis

Today an article in the British Medical Journal has announced that a group of global experts are working on a new resource to help progress research into anxiety disorders, depression and psychosis, with a view to developing new treatments.

GALENOS (Global Alliance for Living Evidence on aNxiety, depressiOn and pSychosis,) will make it easier for everyone, including patients, funders and researchers to access and review the ever-expanding scientific literature that gets published every day around the world.

“We need to provide a foundation of common ground based on the best available data from experiments and observations to drive discovery of new and repurposed treatments.” Says Professor Andrea Cipriani from the University of Oxford who is leading on the project.

“We need to better understand these underlying mechanisms (of anxiety, depression and psychosis) and develop targeted interventions. GALENOS will co-produce recommendations and priorities for future research through an equal partnership with people with lived experience of mental health conditions.

Our vision is a global resource curated by and relevant to a global community.”

In anxiety, depression and psychosis, there has been frustratingly slow progress in developing new therapies that make a substantial difference in practice, as well as in predicting which treatment will work for whom, and in what contexts. This is due to historic underfunding of mental health research, and a lack of accessibility to existing evidence.

The main output from GALENOS will be a series of free-to-access systematic reviews that will be regularly updated with the best available scientific literature. These reviews will analyse research from animal studies through to clinical studies in humans and will provide reliable evidence which will help identify promising areas of research, early on in the process of mental health disorders, as well as identifying gaps in knowledge to be covered by future studies.

By making the best use of existing data, our hope is that GALENOS will accelerate progress in developing a better understanding and new treatments for the prevention and early intervention of anxiety, depression, and psychosis.

You can find out more about GALENOS, and find the BMJ paper here.