Health Variations Programme revisited

This contribution focuses on a period between 2000 and 2004 and centres on collaborative work funded by the ESRC health variations programme. This programme of research represented a shift in Peter’s work away from mental health in formal health settings towards a focus on the social determinants and amelioration of mental health problems. The social origins of mental health problems and how to tackle them has traditionally been a poor relation to the medical clinical institutional way in which most research and attention is placed. Thus this study marked a departure from the study of mental anguish in the closed systems of medicine including primary care to more open systems of the causes and potential solutions of mental health problems. It came at a point of optimism about regeneration and the social democratic social and welfare policies of new labour.