13 December 2021
Dear readers,
This newsletter is turning one - what a cause for celebration. I admit that when I started it, I hoped people will read it and find it useful, but never imagined it would have such a reach one year later, with exactly 450 subscribers (as of right now) from all over the world. I’m very happy to put in the work each month to deliver the latest and most interesting tidbits from the global mental health field, curate resources, share events, read and review publications and dig deep for job opportunities. It is truly a great feeling to share my interests with so many other people and maybe, perhaps, bring some benefit to them. Thank you all for the positive and enthusiastic feedback, keep it coming!
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Yours,
Gergana
News and Notes in Global Mental Health
Here I share interesting pieces of information, announcements and news that have reached me in our field. I will rely on your contributions as well - please share your news or announcements with me.
uMore app looking for partners
For anyone looking for datasets from digital mental health interventions, this will be welcome news: uMore is a mental health tracking app that is built for researchers to easily collect mental health data from a range of populations. uMore is looking for academic partners who are interested in using the platform for research studies. If you want to learn more about the data and what it includes, you can email alex@umore.app.
New course for MHPSS in emergencies and displacement
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has created a free and open access course on community-based mental health and psychosocial support for people in emergency and displacement situations, for the benefit of experts and managers who design, implement and evaluate MHPSS in humanitarian settings. The 30-hour course is available through free registration in the training section on the website and was developed based on the IOM handbook of similar name.
Global Fund integration with mental health
Mental health has been incorporated in the 2023-2028 organizational strategy of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, marking a win for the advocacy efforts of United for Global Mental Health and others who mounted the campaign for it. The advocates state that rolling out mental health integration across HIV and TB programming will help avoid a million new cases of HIV and fourteen million new cases of TB in the world. There is still much to be done, such as guaranteeing the financial resources for supporting the efforts, but this marks the recognition that mental health has a role to play in preventing other health conditions of global concern.
Lived experience leadership report
Everyone working in mental health can benefit from reading the report on lived experience leadership written by Rai Waddingham for the benefit of the UK National Survivor User Network. The report presents a potentially universal nuanced and complex picture of people with lived experience who get into leadership or advocacy roles - deliberately or incidentally. Understanding their opinions, views and conflicting feelings about representing the multitudes of lived experiences will help us all become better practitioners, researchers, friends and allies.
Wellcome global survey opens dataset
Wellcome has made its dataset from the 2020 Global Monitor on mental health open access, together with publicizing its findings. The set comes from the answers of nearly 120,000 people in 113 countries on the perceptions of living with anxiety and depression and the role of science in helping that. The analysis looks at regions and groupings by income, but researchers focusing on individual country patterns can help fill in the picture by analyzing the open dataset.
Support for refugee journalists in Costa Rica
The UNESCO country office in Costa Rica has started an initiative to support the mental health of refugee journalists. The Blue Umbrella Café helps the refugee journalists who have moved to the country to overcome their painful memories and offers assistance in their mental health struggles, setting an example of support for professionals displaced for their media activities. Participants can meet every month, together with their families, have a cup of Costa Rican coffee, use music and literature to express their emotions and receive support from mental health specialists.
Pan-European Coalition opens for members
Following up on its launch of the Pan-European Mental Health Coalition initiative for World Mental Health Day, the European office of the World Health Organization is inviting organizations and individuals from the region to express their interest in joining the Coalition. The organizations willing must have a strong commitment to mental health, and individuals with lived experience as well as those with mental health expertise are welcome. View the invitation and the terms of reference on the WHO web page.
Events in Global Mental Health
The event calendar for 2021 has unspooled to its end. I will create the 2022 calendar soon, because events are announced shortly before they take place, and will update you with the link in the early January newsletter edition - or you could keep track of it at globallyminded.org.
14 December — Global Advocacy in a Virtual World Mental Health for All webinar by United for Global Mental Health. The series of webinars started right as the pandemic was taking over the world and a big chunk of our lives moved online. I’m curious to hear what the speakers, a selection of partners to United for Global Mental Health, have to say about the hurdles and opportunities on virtual advocacy, which may make reaching the audience easier, but also runs the risks of losing the message in all the noise.
Jobs in Global Mental Health
The jobs listed here might not be advertised as being in global mental health and the decision for including them is mine alone. Unless otherwise stated, I have found out about them through job sites, social media posts, other newsletters and so on, so I have no more information on them than publicly available and you should refer to those listed in the job ad.
No or minimum experience necessary
PhD at Stellenbosch University, South Africa (South African citizens and residents only) - by 16 January 2022
PhD at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (South African citizens and residents only) - by 15 January 2022
PhD at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark - by 9 January 2022
Project Officer at Implemental Worldwide, London, UK
Some experience (2-5 years) necessary
Psychiatry Fellowship in Global Mental Health Delivery with Partners in Health, multiple sites
Post-doctoral positions (x 4), University of Copenhagen, Denmark - by 9 January 2022
5+ years of experience necessary
Senior Officer, United for Global Mental Health, remote
Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS University of London, UK - by 4 January 2022
Associate Professor in Global Mental Health at University of Bergen, Norway - by 11 January 2022
Policy Expert (Child Protection and Migration), UNICEF, Rome, Italy - by 19 December
Quantitative/ Mixed-Methods Researcher (Mental Health and Sport for Development), UNICEF, Italy - by 31 December
Resources in Global Mental Health
A section for various opportunities, databanks, information sources that may prove helpful.
This month, to set the stage for any New Year’s resolution you may want to make (but please don’t be hard on yourself), I round up some of the places where you can study global mental health and related disciplines. Disclaimer: I have done the MSc degree at KCL/LSHTM. I am not affiliated right now with any of the universities listed here and have no material or intellectual interest in promoting anything. I also make no recommendations or rankings, simply provide information for you to pursue further. I am most often asked about short courses and master degrees, so this is what I link here. The list does not claim to be exhaustive - some courses for 2022 may not be announced yet.
Master level degrees
Canada - MSc in Psychiatry (Social and Transcultural Psychiatry), McGill University
England - Global Mental Health MSc, King’s College London / London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
England - Global Health and Mental Health MSc, St George’s, University of London
England - Public Mental Health MSc, Queen Mary University of London
Scotland/Online - Global Mental Health (online) MSc/PgDip/PgCert, University of Glasgow
Scotland - Global Mental Health and Society MSc, The University of Edinburgh
Courses
Canada - Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry, McGill University (2 May - 30 June 2022)
Germany - Global Mental Health: Public Health Approaches, University of Heidelberg (27 June - 1 July 2022)
Netherlands - Global Mental Health, University of Amsterdam (10-20 January 2022)
United States/Online - Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery Certificate Program, Harvard Medical School (25 April - 6 May 2022)
Publications in Global Mental Health
The selection of publications ultimately reflects my personal knowledge and preferences, but I have no intended bias. Feel free to send me publications you consider interesting or that you would like to be featured. I try to focus on articles that are free or open access.
Moving beyond a ‘one-size-fits-all’ rationale in global mental health: prospects of a precision psychology paradigm - This article discusses a major weakness in the current global mental health setup: the tendency to focus on the broadest frame of mental health interventions and effects on large groups through clinical trials. This is a paradigm based on maximizing the number of people who will receive optimal outcomes as estimated by the group fluctuations, but it completely misses taking into account the intervention effects at the individual level. Until recently, individual level statistical analyses were not possible, or even invented, to look at the complicated interplay of personal and intervention characteristics. And now we have precision medicine, which “aims at predicting which treatment option may work better for a particular disease in a specific group of people.” So what do you get when you marry precision medicine with global mental health?
Purgato et al. are quite clear in how they see the application of a precision psychology paradigm - predicting which ingredients of MHPSS interventions work and how, looking at individual variability to predict who stands to gain from interventions, using the social determinants framework to paint a picture of individual circumstances for effectiveness, and head-to-head comparisons of MHPSS interventions with long follow-up to determine outcomes. They also state that adopting a common set of individual measures which can be examined as moderators of response will enable ‘share and compare’ between clinical trials, given that now we have the statistical techniques. These points can serve for further unfolding of the global mental health field, and I would have liked to see more elaboration on them in the article in place of the belaboured first two parts. But the individual level consideration in low- and middle-income contexts, clinically and academically, should certainly be the next big target in research and implementation.
Perhaps this is too ambitious for a field that still faces an uphill battle to make mental health interventions as accessible as clean drinking water (in itself a struggle for 1 in every 3 people around the globe). But as global mental health grows as a field, its improvements should be built in all the time.
Psychotropic medicine consumption in 65 countries and regions, 2008–19: a longitudinal study - This very interesting study in The Lancet looks at the dynamics of use of psychiatric medication in 65 countries between 2008 and 2019, using a sales and consumption database. Use is stratified for country income and for class of drug, indicating also percentage changes, and there are findings that while the doses of antidepressants relative to the inhabitants have increased overall during the period, the use of tranquilizers and sedatives has decreased. The trends, however, vary between the country clusters. There are too many variables to consider when interpreting the changes - consistent supply of medication, availability of professionals who can prescribe the often restricted products, market pressures due to companies exiting and entering countries and so on. The graphs mapping use of psychotropic medication to life expectancy, income and prevalence of mental disorders are worth examining closely, and the multitude of observations regarding specific countries in the article gives rise to a number of questions and speculations. Why is Portugal such an outlier both in terms or prevalence of mental disorders and consumption of psychotropic medication? Why did Finland, France, Luxembourg and Norway decrease their overall consumption during the period? Why does Greece have the highest rate of antipsychotics use out of the countries studied? The article does provide some of this speculation, but we will probably have to wait for more detailed suggestions to emerge from this study. And do remember to read the declaration of interests in addition to the article text.
*Cover image courtesy of Pexels.
The Language Corner
This Language Corner is getting ready to celebrate the holidays! Whatever calendar you keep, all throughout the world note in some way the coming 2022, so learn here how to greet your friends and colleagues from various countries!