The South Wales and South-West England (SW²) Hub will bring together an interdisciplinary network of world-leading researchers, from the GW4 Alliance universities of Cardiff, Bath, Bristol, and Exeter, alongside Swansea University, Adferiad Recovery, Bipolar UK, and people with lived experience of severe mental illness, to accelerate impactful research into, and treatments for, severe mental conditions.
Unlike other areas of medical science, there have been very limited advances in treatments for severe mental illnesses for the last fifty years, meaning that real-world outcomes and recovery rates have remained largely the same since the mid-twentieth century discoveries of antipsychotics and lithium.
The SW² Hub team will look to change this situation and improve the lives of people with psychotic disorders, by combining and analysing data acquired at scale, with machine learning and clustering approaches, to advance knowledge of the causes behind the development of severe mental illnesses.