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Depression is a global problem and it's getting more urgent year by year.

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The problem is not only in high income countries, but in middle and low income countries, too.

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Depression is one of the biggest reasons why people have to take time off work, for example.

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And of course, in low income countries, that can be devastating for a family and for a community.

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If the breadwinner isn't able to function anymore, it's got bigger impact than many other huge health problems like cancer and heart disease.

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For example, many people are able to take medication for their depression and they work pretty well.

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The trouble is that when you stop taking them, your risk of relapsing is is what it was before you started.

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And in some countries, they're quite expensive and they're just not available.

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What we're providing through mindfulness is a way in which people who can't get access to the medication actually can do something to help themselves.

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We started this 10 year programme of work funded by the Wellcome Trust.

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The aim of that was to see what are the underlying mechanisms that people get repeatedly depressed or politically suicidal impairing their wellbeing.

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And what could we do about it? The results have been remarkable.

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We've discovered here and other colleagues throughout the world have discovered that more of this practise changes the structure of the brain.

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This was undreamt of 10 years ago. This is a new science of mind that we've been discovering here,

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discovering that the brain can repair itself in ways we hadn't thought possible before.

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This research is coming to an end in two years time. We've had 10 years.

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It's been extraordinarily exciting time to do this research.

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And now we need to fund the future. If the grant comes to an end, when the grant comes to an end, the team disperses.

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The research is written up, but the expertise of a team is lost.

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And when the tide goes out, nothing's left on the beach, potentially.

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Our goal is to raise a total of seven point three million because that will enable us to really build what we need to build.

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That's the professorship in mind and science.

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It's a lectureship to go with it and an administrative support and the support for the premises here to enable this work to go on in perpetuity.

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And embedded really within Oxford University for over 20 years,

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people have endowed distinguished professorships at this university and sometimes three for five hundred years ago.

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There's a professor endowed and that professorship still exists and exist because someone somewhere

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has decided they wanted to make a permanent difference by investing in scholarship and research.

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And still decades, hundreds of years later, people are still able, because of them, to work at the very frontier of human knowledge.

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And that's an incredible investment for the future.

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Losing anyone unexpectedly is hard enough, but losing people through suicides is probably the hardest thing to bear.

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And we need to make sure that fewer people have to go through that in the future.