NEW MEMBERS

Mindgardens Neuroscience Network

Mindgardens is the first innovation enterprise in Australia to focus exclusively on disorders that involve the brain, emotions, nervous system and thinking processes, towards an ambitious objective: to reshape the understanding, prevention, treatment and – eventually – cure of mental health, drug and alcohol and neurological disorders.

We bring clinicians, researchers and health service managers together with people who live with these disorders, in an integrated, virtual collaboration centre. By combining these perspectives, we generate new ideas and approaches that can be translated rapidly into everyday practice, unconstrained by differences in professional cultures or health system silos, to make a real difference in critical areas like youth mental health, psychosis and dementia.

We have four founding Member organisations: Black Dog Institute, Neurological Research Australia (NeuRA), UNSW Sydney and the South Eastern Sydney Local Health District. We offer them technical platforms for research collaboration and support them to build skills and capacity to join forces on essential questions, bridging the boundaries of their individual expertise and accelerating service innovations.

Our approach is already making a difference. With young people as research advisers we are coinvestors in a collaboration with headspace to clarify and simplify the complex youth mental health and drug alcohol systems. We are scaling up a series of projects to improve the physical health of people who live with psychosis. And businessman James Packer and the Packer Family Foundation in May made a $7 million donation to Mindgardens and UNSW to extend our work in bipolar and other mood disorders.

People who live with emotional, cognitive or neurological conditions are some of the most disadvantaged in our community, but improvements in treatments and services have been notoriously slow to arrive – up to 17 years to introduce advances from the lab into the clinic.

We think the Mindgardens collaboration model has enormous potential to speed up the delivery of innovations to people who really need them, and we are looking forward to working closely with Research Australia and its members to bring more emerging ideas to fruition.