Professor Jayati Das-Munshi

Biography

Professor Jayati Das-Munshi is Professor of Social & Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London and Honorary Consultant Liason Psychiatrist with South London & Maudsley NHS Trust.

Her work focuses on maximising the potential of large-scale and linked data to understand and tackle mental health inequalities, with a focus on the mental-physical health interface. Her earliest work harnessed data linkages between area-level measures and national surveys, to understand the role of neighbourhoods in patterning mental health inequities in racially minoritised people.

Subsequently, she led one of the first data linkages of census to electronic health records, at person-level, to understand the social and economic determinants of onset and outcomes in severe mental health conditions. She has also led work using linkages across routine records, to understand the reasons underlying excess mortality in people with severe mental disorders, more recently with a focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health disorders.

With Professor George Ploubidis (University College London), she co-leads the cohorts platform, in the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, where the team have undertaken cross-cohort analyses to understand impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on long-term trajectories of psychological distress. She is Co-Investigator for the ERISK cohort and for Lambeth HDRC, where she advises on data linkages.

She is Co-Director of the UKRI Population Health Improvement (PHI-UK), Population Mental Health Consortium, which she Directs with Dan Barrett (Thrive-LDN).

The PHI-UK population mental health consortium brings together 10+ partnerships across universities, local government, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience, to understand what can be done to prevent the onset of mental health problems, using insights from large-scale linked data. The consortium focusses on three challenge areas: children and young people, suicide and self-harm prevention, and multiple long-term conditions.

She has led work for the World Health Organisation (WHO), leading to guidelines for the management of physical health in people with severe mental illnesses. She is an advisor for the UK Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Surveys, and has worked in an advisory capacity for the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities (OHID, previously Public Health England).

She is also an advisor to the Equalities Data Quality and Research Subgroup at NHS-E, which seeks to improve the quality of data collected on ethnicity and other protected characteristics across routine health records, nationally.