John Field on the latest Foresight report

How should we make the most of our lives in a fast-changing world? And how can the latest scientific developments help? The latest Foresight project, Mental Capital and Wellbeing, launched in October, examined how to make the most of our mental resources throughout our lives.

Mental capital encompasses our brain’s ability to learn and think and includes our emotional resources; the way we interact with others and our resilience in the face of stress. The project was concerned with the factors that might hinder or help develop a person’s mental capital and wellbeing throughout their lives, from cradle to grave.

The government has a responsibility to create environments that provide opportunities in which we can all develop our mental capital and improve our mental wellbeing. However, the report also highlights the important role that individuals can play in taking up these opportunities to make the most of themselves in the future.

Trends

Some future challenges are easy to spot. An ageing population will see more people at risk of dementia; by 2071, the number of over-65s in Britain could rise to over 21 million, with 9.5 million aged over 80. On current trends, the number of Britons with dementia is likely to double, costing the country over £50 billion a year.

Mental ill-health is already a significant problem. An increasingly competitive globalised economy will put new pressures on individuals and organisations to develop new skills as business and services seek to innovate, raise standards and reach new markets. Around 16 per cent of adults and 10 per cent of children suffer common mental disorders such as depression and stress at any one time, with huge costs to individuals and their families as well as the country as a whole.

Findings

The report’s main findings are, first, that early intervention is crucial in developing and maintaining mental capital and wellbeing. Whether it is a matter of identifying and tackling learning difficulties among children and young people, or developing suitable biomarkers to diagnose the onset of dementia in older people, early interventions are the most productive with impacts throughout life.

Second, there is enormous scope for improving our approaches to mental ill-health. This is not simply a matter of improved treatment for those who experience common mental disorders, but also of investing in co¬ordinated interventions to reduce the factors that place people at risk of mental ill health – factors such as debt. 

Third, there are huge pay-offs from integrated approaches to wellbeing. Rather than focusing, for example, solely on medical interventions, the project demonstrates the importance of other interventions, such as education and social networking, in improving people’s mental capital and wellbeing throughout life.

Costs and benefits

In order to assess the potential cost effectiveness of the project’s proposals to tackle some of these future challenges, the team sought advice from economists. They costed a number of the interventions, and also identified the benefits.

In most cases, the balance was a positive one. More difficult is the fact that many of the initiatives may involve spending by one government department, while the benefits accrue to another. So responsibility for providing resources in the future to enable earlier identification of learning difficulties in children might lie with the Department for Children, Schools and Families. However, the benefits of such interventions, such as decreases in anti-social behaviour and savings for the criminal justice system, could accrue to the Ministry of Justice. What is clear is that this ambitious, world-class report will help government to understand these relationships better.

Thorough review

Foresight projects take a longterm forward look, identifying current trends and factors for change, and projecting their influence forward for the next twenty years.

This project drew on 80 reviews of existing research in five areas: work and wellbeing; education and learning through life; learning difficulties; mental health; and the neuroscience of mental capital; as well as expert views from scientists and policy makers as to how we address challenges we face in these areas.

It was led by the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor John Beddington, and sponsored by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Taking two years to complete and involving over 400 experts from 16 countries, the extensive evidence base has provided much food for thought.
 
Professor John Field is Co-director of the Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning, Stirling Institute of Education, University of Stirling