MINDSET, the Multimodal INference and Data science for pSychiatric Epidemiology and Treatment programme, is led by Dr Justin C Yang at University College London. We use psychiatric epidemiology, causal inference, and data science to understand mental health across the biological, clinical, social, institutional, and environmental layers of people’s lives.
Mental health is shaped by more than any single diagnosis, dataset, exposure, or service contact can capture. Our work brings together different forms of evidence to study how distress emerges, how people encounter systems of care and support, and why outcomes are so uneven across groups and places.
We are especially interested in the points where people’s lives meet institutions: schools, health services, communities, social care, and policy. These encounters can leave traces in routine records, linked administrative data, clinical text, spatial data, cohort studies, and, increasingly, biological measures. Used carefully, these data can reveal patterns of need, care, crisis, exclusion, inequality, and recovery that would otherwise be difficult to see.
But records are not whole lives. MINDSET is concerned with using complex data in ways that are methodologically rigorous, ethically grounded, and accountable to lived experience and public benefit.
Current projects include an ADR UK-funded study using linked health and education data to understand outcomes for neurodivergent young people, and a UKRI Mental Health Platform-funded project examining how socioemotional experiences, including relationships, belonging, adversity, and institutional contact, shape pathways into severe mental illness.
MINDSET works across academic, NHS, public, private, and voluntary sector settings, with a commitment to open science, equitable research inclusion and engagement, and participatory approaches that recognise lived experience as expertise. Our broader interests include severe mental illness, substance use, neurodevelopmental conditions, social and spatial inequality, applied health and social care research, and responsible uses of emerging data science in mental health.