Depression is a global problem and it's getting more urgent year by year.
The problem is not only in high income countries, but in middle and low income countries, too.
Depression is one of the biggest reasons why people have to take time off work, for example.
And of course, in low income countries, that can be devastating for a family and for a community.
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.
For example, many people are able to take medication for their depression and they work pretty well.
The trouble is that when you stop taking them, your risk of relapsing is is what it was before you started.
And in some countries, they're quite expensive and they're just not available.
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.
We started this 10 year programme of work funded by the Wellcome Trust.
The aim of that was to see what are the underlying mechanisms that people get repeatedly depressed or politically suicidal impairing their wellbeing.
And what could we do about it? The results have been remarkable.
We've discovered here and other colleagues throughout the world have discovered that more of this practise changes the structure of the brain.
This was undreamt of 10 years ago. This is a new science of mind that we've been discovering here,
discovering that the brain can repair itself in ways we hadn't thought possible before.
This research is coming to an end in two years time. We've had 10 years.
It's been extraordinarily exciting time to do this research.
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.
The research is written up, but the expertise of a team is lost.
And when the tide goes out, nothing's left on the beach, potentially.
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.
That's the professorship in mind and science.
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.
And embedded really within Oxford University for over 20 years,
people have endowed distinguished professorships at this university and sometimes three for five hundred years ago.
There's a professor endowed and that professorship still exists and exist because someone somewhere
has decided they wanted to make a permanent difference by investing in scholarship and research.
And still decades, hundreds of years later, people are still able, because of them, to work at the very frontier of human knowledge.
And that's an incredible investment for the future.
Losing anyone unexpectedly is hard enough, but losing people through suicides is probably the hardest thing to bear.
And we need to make sure that fewer people have to go through that in the future.