Recession and Mental Health in Scotland: Do Personal or Community Factors promote Resilience to Labour Market Change?

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This project will examine how, over time, between 2001 and 2014, mental health outcomes and mental health care use in Scotland have related to changes in local labour markets, particularly changing levels of employment during the recent recession. The study will examine mental health outcomes for individuals (including self-reported mental illness and death due to mental illness) and use of NHS care for mental illnesses (including hospital care, outpatient services and prescribed medicines). The study population include about 150,000 people in the Scottish Longitudinal Study and we are able to examine information collected over time for this large group, which makes the study particularly powerful. This project will analyse a new and innovative dataset made up of secondary data from several different sources which have not been combined in this way before. We have permission from the data guardians to use these data in a secure data centre, so that no identifiable information about any individual will be released. Our focus will be especially on patterns of change that we can observe for large groups of people living in different parts of Scotland. The public benefits of this research project will be primarily in providing evidence to inform policy makers and organizations contributing to policies for those affected by mental health issues. When our findings are approved for public release, we anticipate that public interest will focus on the following aspects of our findings:- Relationships between local trends in employment levels during the recession, and mental health and health care outcomes for different social groups in the population. This is of relevance for policy makers in NHS Scotland, and for other agencies, such as Support in Mind, Scotland, and Centre for Welfare Reform, which are concerned to address, and advocate for the needs of those at risk of mental health problems in different parts of the country. - A more complete picture of mental health outcomes for populations in different types of localities, and how these change over time. These findings have potential to contribute to the design of population mental health indicators for localities, relevant for performance monitoring and needs assessment by NHS Scotland.This research project also provides an excellent opportunity to further develop a growing collaboration between two leading research centres concerned with inequalities in health and wellbeing and how we can address these inequalities through policy and action in social and economic sectors as well as through the medical system. It also focuses specifically on one of the research priorities for ESRC relating to mental health in the population. As well as senior academics (Pearce, Dibben and Bambra) our multi-disciplinary team includes two 'Early Career' Academic colleagues (Cunningham, as a Co-I with expertise in application of Geographical Information Systems to explore change in social inequalities and divisions over time and Cherrie as a PDRA with postgraduate and postdoctoral experience in Environmental Epidemiology and Geography and in complex data management and analysis). The project will be supported by an advisory group, including Prof Sarah Curtis, Professor Emeritus, Durham University (internationally recognized for her research in health geography and has been directly involved in helping to develop this project and to prepare the linked dataset on which it will draw), Dr Mylene Riva (Associate Professor, McGill University, Canada, expert in health geography and geospatial analysis and has published research in collaboration with Prof Curtis on employment conditions and health in England), Dr Lynne Friedli (independent mental health specialist and advocate) and Dr Simon John Duffy (Director Centre for Welfare Reform), Dr Andrew Millard and Dr Stuart McTaggart, NHS Health Scotland, Frances Simpson, Chief Executive of Support in Mind Scotland.