About mental health social care

What is mental health social care?

Mental health social care “empowers people living with mental illness, people experiencing mental distress, their unpaid carers, and local communities. It seeks to enable people to lead fulfilling and independent lives by providing information, advice and offering practical, personalised support with everyday activities. It facilitates agency and the ability to access a life with purpose, meaning and a voice as an active citizen – not just the absence of symptoms. Through working in and with communities, mental health social care helps to develop their capacity to be supportive, resilient and emotionally healthy” (Association of Mental Health Providers, 2022)

What does mental health social care look like?

Mental health social care encompasses a variety of services. These include:

• community support;
• mental health social workers to assess individuals’ support needs and help them plan and access support;
• employment services to support individuals in and seeking employment;
• advice and advocacy on, for example, financial or legal matters;
• supported accommodation;
• crisis services in the event of severe mental health deterioration.

Why the Mental Health Social Care Incubator?

Practice and policy rhetoric acknowledges the importance of social care to mental health systems. However, a truly biopsychosocial understanding placing ‘social’ on equal footing with ‘bio’ and ‘psycho’ has not been a significant part of this landscape.

The Mental Health Social Care Incubator represents an important step in establishing the identity of the field. It will provide an infrastructure and activities to bring together diverse stakeholders throughout this field.

New research activity will lead to the development of a more robust evidence base, helping improve mental health social care policy and practice, as well as outcomes for people who need support. In particular, groups experiencing inequalities in mental health are better served through mental health social care than solely through health services.

Building research capacity in and with third sector groups who work with those sections of society will be a priority of the Incubator.

What is an incubator?

The NIHR Incubators address areas where there is a need to build research capacity on a national level. NIHR provides some funding to enable key stakeholders to identify the barriers that exist and to suggest and implement, where possible, solutions to building research capacity in a sustainable and meaningful way.

This initiative aims to encourage early career interest in target disciplines to build identifiable communities through networking and provision of bespoke training and development support. Incubators are virtual, managed across multiple sites and organised by discipline. They provide targeted high level career development support, led by experts in the field and supported by the NIHR. Incubators are bespoke to meet the needs of each area and are developing at different paces