Our beloved son Nick left us exactly ten years ago, on 21st January 2014. It often seems like yesterday, but we often wonder what he would have made of the tumultuous decade we have since lived: Brexit, Trump, Johnson, Truss, Israel and Gaza, but above all the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a country and people Nick came to love in his final months.

In the awful wake of losing Nick, we decided to support MQ, then in its infancy. Understanding all too little ourselves, we were shocked at the lack of funded research in the field of mental health. Since those early days we've been able to help support two successful MQ research projects led by Martijn van den Heuvel (2015) and Kathryn Young and Colette Hirsch (2021-22).

For more information on Martijn van den Heuvel's work on mapping connectivity within the brain, click on the link below: https://www.amsterdamumc.org/en/research/researchers/martijn-van-den-heuvel.htm.

For more on Colette and Katie's project, go to https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/youth-depression-and-anxiety-during-and-after-the-covid. In 2022, as part of Deutsche Bank's Global 24-hour Transforming Mental Health "hackathon", which challenges employees to develop a technological solution to a given problem within 24 hours, over 1300 employees world-wide created a prototype app version of Colette's on-line intervention to help manage anxiety. In 2023, MQ and DBS won the Inside Out award for the best use of technology.

We're inviting you to give to MQ now, in Nick's memory, not to any particular project (unless you'd like to specify one), but to their excellent efforts across the spectrum of mental health. We particularly appreciate MQ's dedication to research and their consistent support of early career researchers.

Here's MQ's statement about what they do:

We’re MQ, the mental health research charity. We transform lives through research, helping to create a future where mental illnesses are understood, effectively treated and one day prevented.

Right now, one in four people in the UK are living with a mental health condition. Our scientists investigate a huge range of issues: depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, eating disorders and more. We’re bringing together everything from cutting-edge neuroscience to social studies to find the answers we need. Better is possible.