“Globally, it is estimated, that only 7% of health budgets are allocated to address mental health difficulties. Most investment is focused on long-term institutional care and psychiatric hospitals, resulting in a near total policy failure to promote mental health holistically for all. (...) Public policies continue to neglect the importance of the preconditions of poor mental health, such as violence, disempowerment, social exclusion and isolation and the breakdown of communities, systemic socioeconomic disadvantage and harmful conditions at work and in schools.(...) For any mental health system to be compliant with the right to health, the biomedical and psychosocial models and interventions must be appropriately balanced, avoiding the arbitrary assumption that biomedical interventions are more effective.” (United Nations, Human Rights Council; Report of the Special Rapporteur, March 2017;  p.3ff)

September 2018 will see the seventh Qualitative Research on Mental Health conference, QRMH7. These biennial conferences have grown from a modest beginning some fourteen years ago. They have developed in response to wide acknowledgement that a fuller understanding of mental health difficulties, their origins and their treatment entails a comprehensive range of epistemologies and research methodologies. Qualitative methods offer essential insight into highly relevant phenomena such as relationship, power, and social exclusion, which other approaches are hardly able to deliver. The QRMH conferences are a multidisciplinary, international forum in which research that can address such questions is highlighted, shared and scrutinised.

The 1st and 2nd Qualitative Research on Mental Health Conferences were held in Tampere, Finland, in 2006 and 2008, the 3rd and 4th in Nottingham, U.K., in 2010 and 2012, and the 5th and 6th in Chania, Greece, in 2014 and 2016. Successive events have attracted steadily growing international interest. These have come from a diversity of backgrounds; mental health service users, health and social care professionals, social scientists and health policy makers, and they have created a space for lively and enriching discussions. The 7th Qualitative Research in Mental Health Conference is due to take place on September 20-22, 2018 in Berlin, Germany.