2020 Annual Report MH SIG

In 2020, the group was due to meet in May at the annual Primary Care Mental Health conference in York, and again in July at the SAPC ASM in Leeds. Due to COVID, both conferences were cancelled. However,  abstracts submitted to the Primary Care Mental Health conference were published on the SAPC website with a DOI, and a Twitterfest was held on the Friday of what would have been the last day of the ASM. During the Twitterfest, members of the SIG tweeted their favourite mental health paper published (by their peers) in the preceding 12 months.

We held a zoom meeting in October (at the time of World Mental Health Day) that was open to all members of the SIG.  During the meeting we discussed two questions: what has been the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on our research and how we have overcome difficulties/learned to do things differently, and what will be the important mental health research questions over next year? There was lots of great debate and a blog summarizing the meeting was published on the SAPC website. Another virtual meeting will be held 5th February 2021.

In the last month, Carolyn and Katrina have been meeting online with Simon Gilbody and Ruth Wadman (both based in York) to discuss hosting Primary Care Mental Health conference online 26th May 2021. A ‘save the date’ has already been circulated to SIG members and all those who registered for the conference in 2020.