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The Oxford Centre for Women’s Mental Health is a ground-breaking partnership between the university’s Department of Psychiatry, the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health (NDWRH), along with colleagues across the University, including the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in the Humanities Division.
Funded by the Oxford Medical Sciences Division’s Strategic Research Fund, it will be led by a new Professor of Women’s Mental Health, the first post of its kind at Oxford, which is being advertised now.
The centre was the brainchild of Heads of Department Professor Belinda Lennox in Psychiatry and Professor Krina Zondervan at NDWRH, who identified a gap in research, despite considerable expertise in related areas across the university.
The centre’s goal will be to produce impactful interdisciplinary research that increases understanding of women’s mental health, and influences policy and practice both locally and globally. It will bring together expertise from medical, social, economic, cultural and biological sciences to design new prevention strategies, interventions and treatments.
More than 500 million globally are experiencing a mental disorder, while suicide is the leading cause of death among new mothers in the UK.
Professor Lennox said: "Despite living longer than men, women spend more of their lives in poor health and have higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders across the life course. Yet a ‘male as default’ approach has meant there is a major knowledge gap, with causes and mechanisms of women’s mental ill health poorly understood, and treatments rarely being sex specific.
The urgent global need and interest in improving women’s mental health has never been greater. Our centre will be at the forefront of this work, harnessing Oxford’s unique breadth of expertise, and fostering collaboration and innovation, to accelerate research in this area for the benefit of female patients.”
The Department of Psychiatry already has a growing body of work in this area, including a project investigating severe mental illness in new mothers, the impact of hormones on psychosis treatment and symptoms and the effects of menopause on brain health.
Current research at the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health includes the Perinatal Mental Health project, which is developing community-based approaches to preventing and supporting common mental health problems during and after pregnancy in rural India, currently being extended to the UK; the Perinatal Mental Health Study, a mixed-methods study of women’s mental health in northern and southern India, exploring women’s perceptions of mental health, culturally-adapted and psychometrically validated self-report measures for common mental disorders, and investigating perinatal mental health trajectories and associated infant outcomes, and the work of the Policy Research Unit in Maternal and Neonatal Health and Care including population-based maternity surveys exploring long-term trends in perinatal mental health, and identifying what is driving inequalities in mental health and access to care.
Professor Zondervan said:
Women’s mental health has historically been under-researched and under-prioritised, despite its profound impact across the life course. This new centre creates an opportunity to bring together expertise from across disciplines to better understand the biological, social and cultural factors that shape women’s mental health, and ultimately improve care and outcomes worldwide.
The Centre will extend beyond traditional biomedical frameworks, incorporating critical and creative perspectives from the humanities, to explore how meaning, lived experience and culture inform women’s mental wellbeing and treatments."
Josie Bamford, Executive Producer, at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, said: “The Cultural Programme within the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities brings together world class artists with world leading academics, students and communities for exceptional creative experiences that reach broad and diverse audiences. The role of story-telling, lived experience and different perspectives are key in helping us to explore, understand, translate and engage.
“We are so delighted to collaborate with partners across the University to establish the new Oxford Centre for Women’s Mental Health and look forward to welcoming artists and creatives to connect with academics and the pioneering research taking place to find new ways to share experiences and ensure broad impact.”
Find out more about the Professor of Women's Mental Health post and how to apply