In 2025, the Bennett Institute was awarded £7 million from Wellcome to support groundbreaking research into mental health treatment outcomes.
The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme was launched in 2008 to increase access to NICE-recommended psychological therapies for anxiety disorders and depression. Now known as NHS Talking Therapies, the programme treated over 670,000 adults in England in 2025/26. Outcome data is collected from 98% of people who complete a course of treatment.
The OpenSAFELY Talking Therapies project will create a new national resource for mental health research. While maintaining strong privacy protections, we will make the NHS Talking Therapies data available through OpenSAFELY and link it with other health datasets.
This project supports Wellcome’s mental health strategy and its ambition to drive a step change in early interventions for anxiety, depression, and psychosis. Researchers and analysts will be able to use this resource to explore a range of questions, such as:
- The short and long-term effects of psychological therapies on mental and physical health
- Which treatments work well for different groups of people
- How NHS Talking Therapies services can be improved and delivered more effectively
We will also launch an Electronic Health Record Support Unit to help researchers use this new resource, and support mental health researchers who have extensive expertise in their field but less experience of working with electronic health records.