aThese studies seek to reduce the burden of mental illness and to address the real-world questions that persons living with mental illness, their families, care providers, payers and policy makers face in selecting, delivering, and financing optimal care. The main strategic initiatives are:

Psychiatric Epidemiology
These studies examine the rates and risk factors of the various mental illnesses in the local general population and other subgroups.

Mental Health Literacy and Health Seeking Behaviour
These studies address issues relating to the perceptions of mental illnesses and health-related behaviours including health seeking behaviour, the causes and influences of such behaviours.

Quality Assessment and Quality Improvement
This initiative addresses issues relating to developing measures of health system performance across multiple dimensions; evaluating the performance of the health system for different population subgroups. It also includes the development, adaptation, and validation of instruments for the screening of mental health and tools to measure quality of care, and other mental health outcomes.

Ethics of Psychiatric Treatment and Research
Research on people with mental illness can be fraught with difficulties as the effects of certain mental illnesses can impair decisional capacity. This initiative examines the various ethical issues and problems pertaining to psychiatric research and seeks workable solutions to ensure that research is done in a way that does not place vulnerable individuals at unreasonable risk.