Catalyze, inspire, innovate for mental health
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In this issue:
- Events
- GMH@Harvard 2nd Annual Open Day
- Events in the Community
- Save the Date
- Impact Stories of the Week
- Opportunities
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Celebrating the diversity of global mental health activities in our community
Saturday April 13th 2019
8:30am-4:00pm
Sever Hall 113 | Harvard University
The event will feature keynote speaker:
Patrick J. Kennedy,
former Congressman (D-RI); Lead author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008; founder of The Kennedy Forum and DontDenyMe.org; co-founder of One Mind. Followed by presentations and a poster session from faculty, staff, students, and others from our community who are working in the field of global mental health.
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Global Mental Health Events in the Local Community
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HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine Department Seminar
Wednesday April 10th 12:00-1:30pm
1st Floor Conference Room - 641 Huntingon Ave. Boston MA 02115
Presenter:
Melino Ndayizigiye MD, MMsC-GHD, Clinical Director, Partners in Health, Lesotho; Former Research Fellow in DGHSM
Dr. Ndayizigiye will share his findings on a study on early childhood development. He will focus on cognitive development for children enrolled in a trial, parenting skills improvement, and others findings such as rates of depression among the mothers who participated in the study as well as lessons learned on this model of integration.
GMH@Harvard Guest Seminar Series
Friday April 12th 1:00-2:00pm
Ballard Room, Countway Library, 10 Shattuck St. Boston, MA 02115
Most children in low and middle income countries do not have access to regular developmental assessments due to the lack of validated scalable tools that can be administered by non-specialist workers. This results in a large 'detection gap' where most children in need of interventions do not get identified in a timely manner. The absence of such tools also limits our ability to monitor and evaluate the impact of interventions aimed at improving developmental outcomes. Our interdisciplinary team has devised novel solutions to this problem. Our tools, DEEP (Developmental Assessment on an E-Platform) and START (Screening Tools for Autism Risk Using Technology), harness the potential of mHealth technology for assessment of neurodevelopment in preschool children. Our pilot studies assess a) the acceptability of these tools to children and families, b) feasibility of their delivery by non-specialist workers in childrens' homes and c) their validity against gold standard child assessments.
RSVP HERE.
GMH@Harvard Guest Seminar Series
Monday April 15th 5:30 - 7:00pm
Kresge G2, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
677 Huntington Ave. Boston MA
Presente
r: Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies; Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies; Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
With growing inequality, the American Dream is becoming less effective as a collective myth. With its focus on material success, competition and self-reliance, the intensified diffusion of neoliberal scripts of the self is leading the upper-middle class toward a mental health crisis while the working class and low-income groups do not have the resources needed to live the dream. This seminar discusses a possible way forward through broadening cultural membership by promoting new narratives of hope centered on a plurality of criteria of worth, ‘ordinary universalism’ and destigmatizing stigmatized groups.
RSVP HERE.
HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine Department Seminar
Wednesday April 24th 12:00-1:30pm
1st Floor Conference Room - 641 Huntingon Ave. Boston MA 02115
Center on the Developing Child - Harvard University
June 4th 2019, 9:00am - 5:00pm Cambridge, MA
Decades of research have shown it is possible to improve outcomes for children and families facing adversity. However, on average, the impacts of early childhood programs are modest, and they have not improved over time. So, how can we build better programs that achieve greater outcomes for more young children and families?
Do you want to build stronger programs & achieve better outcomes? Attend our Science-Based Innovation Training! We go beyond asking whether a program works, & ask: What about the program works? How does it make a difference? Who benefits most? Join us for this one-day training to help programs increase impact for children and families.
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Global Mental Health Events beyond the Greater Boston area
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October 25-28, 2019
Description from the President of the World Association of Social Psychiatry:
The theme of the Congress,
“Social determinants of mental health and access to care”
is contemporary and relevant. It reflects our concern for mental health in this age of globalization, commercialization and the merging of boundaries between nations. Despite rapid advances in all fields, enough attention has not been devoted to the social determinants of mental health. And access to care remains severely limited in most parts of the world including high income countries. Our world is changing as never before, which has profound implications for mental health. We are sure, the deliberations of the Congress will give us newer insights into the emerging dynamics in all these areas. We will have four days of rich scientific programme with invited lectures, symposia, workshops, free papers and posters. There will be also be cultural events and get togethers which will be very entertaining to you and families.
For more information and to submit an abstract to present contact:
Alina Puscas.
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December 9th - December 20th 2019
Goa, India
Register by April 31st for early bird rates!
This course is an excellent opportunity to enhance your understanding and skills in the field of global mental health. The course takes place annually at Sangath, Goa, India, and it welcomes participants from across the world to share their experiences and learn collaboratively. Email
LMH@Sangath.in
for more information.
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Global Mental Health Impact Story of the Week
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Congratulations to
Dr. Vikram Patel,
Chair of the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard Steering Committee, on being awarded the 2019 John Dirks Gairdner Global Health Award
"For his world-leading research in global mental health, generating knowledge on the burden and determinants of mental health problems in low- and middle-income countries and pioneering approaches for the prevention and treatment of mental health in low-resource settings"
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This initiative is a collaboration between
GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard
and 7 Cups Foundation. Its goal is to design and deploy a digital platform to build a mental health care workforce which is competent to deliver brief psychological treatments for common mental health problems with adequate quality. The goals of this initiative are aligned with the recommendations of the recent
Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development (2018)
: to exponentially increase access to quality, cutting-edge psychological therapies for mood, anxiety, trauma related and substance use disorders globally.
7 Cups Foundation will design and build the digital platform using its expertise in app-based training of psychosocial therapies and the tools developed by
Sangath
to train and supervise front-line workers in India. GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard will provide academic oversight to inform the content of the platform, assessments of competency and quality, and analyses of the impacts of training on provider and patient outcomes. The initiative is guided by leading
psychological treatment scientists
and engages a research design group to standardise the methodology for
digitizing curricula and competency assessments.
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Dr. Elise Robinson, assistant professor of Genetic Epidemiology at the Chan School of Public Health, is seeking bright, motivated and committed applicants for an administrative support position. Ideal candidates are those who both have experience and thrive in an administrative support role. This position will provide critical support to Dr. Robinson and her research teams focused on the genetics of autism. Interested applications should send an email to
Alice Galvin
and apply via the
Harvard system.
Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan, India
The Men Against Violence (MAV) collaborative is seeking to recruit one full-time Research
Fellow to assist in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Gender-Based Violence
(GBV) prevention program in the rural district of Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan. The MAV
project involves the development of a culturally relevant GBV prevention campaign directed
towards young men, especially young husbands.MAV is a collaborative project between the Mata Jai Kaur Maternal and Child Health Centre, a non-profit that provides maternal and mental health care to mothers in Sri Ganganagar; Sangath, a mental health non-profit non-government organisation based in Goa, India; and Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.
Fluency in Hindi is a requirement.
Madhya Pradesh, India
Enabling translation of Science to Service to ENhance Depression CarE (ESSENCE) is a US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded, five-year-long (2017-22) implementation research project being implemented in Madhya Pradesh, India. Its overall goal is to bridge the science to service gap and strengthen an existing collaborative network of institutions in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal) by generating knowledge on effective and cost-effective training and implementation support methods for scaling up of evidence-based interventions for mental disorders, and building capacity in a range of key stakeholders to enhance the conduct of implementation research, the dissemination of its findings, and the uptake of this evidence in policy and programs, ultimately resulting in reduction of treatment gap for mental disorders. This fellowship aims to build implementation research capacity in four South Asian countries (India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal) for knowledge generation by creating opportunities for early and mid-career global health researchers. Apply by April 15th. Applicants must be nationals of ESSENCE countries, i.e., India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal;
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