This Primer & Provocation roundtable brings together interdisciplinary researchers working on social inequalities in mental health to critically reflect on the challenges, consequences, and possibilities of engaging with “missing” data. Within mental health research, absences in datasets are rarely accidental. They often emerge from long-standing inequities in who is counted, whose experiences are deemed relevant, and who has the authority to design research instruments in the first place. When minoritised populations or people with lived experience of mental health problems are excluded—whether through sampling strategies, survey design, diagnostic categories, or institutional priorities—these silences shape the evidence base available to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners.

The panellists will explore how such gaps arise and how they become embedded in the knowledge infrastructures of mental health research. We will ask and discuss: What historical and institutional conditions drive these omissions? How do they influence what becomes legible as “knowledge,” and what forms of suffering remain unrecognized? The roundtable further examines how today’s missing data can reproduce or reinforce future priorities, potentially constraining the field’s ability to address inequality, structural disadvantage, and diverse forms of lived experience.

Finally, we will discuss methodological and ethical strategies for working with incomplete or exclusionary datasets. How might researchers acknowledge absences, read silences as data, and challenge the assumptions baked into existing sources? And what creative or collaborative approaches can help us redress these gaps in ways that do not merely fill them, but transform how mental health inequalities are studied?

Panellists: Prof Jayati Das-Munshi, Raza Griffiths, Prof Stephani Hatch, Rachel Hill, Prof Ann Phoenix

Chairs: Dr Dörte Bemme & Dr Darío Moreno-Agostino

Join us for a roundtable (1 hour) with people engaged in research on social inequalities in mental health to reflect on the challenges, consequences, and strategies of working with “missing” data, particularly in datasets that may not have included minoritised populations or people with lived experience of mental health problems.

We’ll explore topics such as:

• How did the gaps come about? Who has the power to collect data and design questions to begin with?

• How does this impact the evidence and legacies of what’s considered relevant at a given time?

• How can such gaps (re)produce current and future priorities?

• How can we address absences and silences when using existing data?

The roundtable (1 hour) will be followed by a Q&A session (30 minutes) across the members of the panel and attendees.

Panellists’ bios:

Professor Jayati Das-Munshi is an academic psychiatrist and epidemiologist whose work focuses on mental health inequalities and their social determinants. She holds a Chair in Social & Psychiatric Epidemiology at King’s College London and is Co-Director of the UKRI-funded Population Health Improvement UK (PHIUK), Population Mental Health Consortium. She also co-leads the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health platform on cohorts and statistics. The Population Mental Health Consortium is a partnership across 10+ academic organisations, local government, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience, which seeks to improve population mental health, through maximising the potential of large-scale linked UK data, informed by partnerships with people with lived experience and those working across policy.

Her research focuses on the social and structural drivers of mental illness, ethnic and racial inequalities in health, the links between physical and mental health across the life course, and the impact of the COVID19 pandemic on inequalities in people with mental health conditions. Her work has informed guidelines and initiatives led by the World Health Organization, UK government departments, and the United Nations, where she has contributed in expert advisory roles. She has particular expertise in large-scale longitudinal data and led one of the first data linkages of national census data to electronic mental health records in England, at individual-level. This linkage has shed light on the specific inequalities impacting onset, course and outcomes of people living with severe mental health conditions.

Alongside her academic work, Professor Das-Munshi is a practicing consultant psychiatrist in palliative care at St Christopher’s Hospice.

Raza Griffiths is a lived experience campaigner, researcher and educator. He authored the Call for Social Justice manifesto highlighting the demands of intersectionally marginalised mental health service users. He also led on consultations with service users to develop the NSUN 4PI Involvement Framework. He is a Lived Experience researcher at the Mental Health Policy Research Unit, University College (London) and co-authors lived experience commentaries on the Unit's research in peer reviewed journals. As part of the King's Lived Experience Advisory Board, he co-wrote a Research Methods Toolkit guiding non-specialists in research methodology, and played a key role in co-writing and co-presenting for an innovative Wellcome grant for £500,000 for developing involvement in neuroscience and data science. He has also represented the Board at competitions including the Board's successful bid at the King's Engaged Researcher Award (2025). He is a Lived Experience Lecturer at Kent, Essex and Greenwich universities.

Stephani Hatch is Professor of Sociology and Epidemiology and co-leads the Marginalised Communities programme within CSMH and the Narrowing Inequalities platform within the UKRI Population Mental Health Consortium. Her work uses qualitative and quantitative methods to examine social inequalities in mental health and health services. She advises national organisations on inclusive research practices and data.

Rachel Hill is a former Secondary School languages teacher with long-term experience of living with a mental health condition. After forced retirement left a huge gap in her sense of purpose, she now endeavours to use her experience to inform, encourage, inspire, and motivate others. She finds her mental health journey is now presenting meaningful opportunities. "The greatest good I can do is not just share my story but actively work to improve/create services so that other sufferers have an easier time accessing the help they need to help themselves". She is passionate about creating impact and shaping future decisions about what is helpful, needed, and potentially beneficial, not only for those suffering but for those NHS policy makers who decide where funds are spent in the research and treatment of mental illness. "To be the difference I want to see in this world is possible with meaningful involvement," is her vision.

Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Social Research Institute, UCL Institute of Education. Her research focuses on the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It includes racialised and gendered identities, mixed-parentage, masculinities, consumption, motherhood, families, migration and transnational families.

Chairs’ bios

Dörte Bemme, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London and the Social Theory Platform lead at the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. Dr. Bemme’s research examines the globalization of mental health care and the production and circulation of expert knowledge across diverse institutional and cultural settings. She has conducted more than a decade of multi‑sited ethnography of the field of Global Mental Health (GMH), working in international institutions, global academic consortia, and implementation sites in South Africa, Nepal, Canada, UK, Europe and the US. As a collaborator in GMH research, she works to advance reflexivity, epistemic justice and equity in global partnerships. Dr. Bemme is also a Co‑Investigator on the Wellcome Discovery Award Collective Action for Race Equity in Health and Social Care (CARE‑HSC) using participatory, interdisciplinary, and. creative methodologies to understand how racial equity and institutional change in the UK are pursued and resisted. She is the Managing Editor of Transcultural Psychiatry, Social Theory Editor of Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology and on the editorial board of Somatosphere.

Darío Moreno-Agostino (he/him) is a Principal Research Fellow in Population Mental Health at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies. He leads the Wellcome Trust-funded “Making the margins visible” project and co-leads the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health platform on cohorts and statistics. In his research, Darío uses existing data from multiple longitudinal population studies to document social, generational, and intersectional inequalities in population mental health.