Welcome to Global Mental Health Unboxed!
Your monthly newsletter on all things global mental health
2 December 2020
Dear readers,
Thank you for giving this newsletter your attention. I’m making it with the intention of it being engaging, helpful and instructive. Any feedback is welcome, since this is the first edition and I want to learn what is useful to you and what can be improved. For now I aim to publish a new one every month - we’ll see how it goes!
This newsletter is FREE. If you like it, please forward it to others who might enjoy it. Anyone not subscribed who wants to do so can simply hit the button below.
Contact me at manolova.gergana@gmail.com to let me know about your impressions and feedback.
Yours,
Gergana
Events in Global Mental Health
This is a highlight of upcoming events for the next two weeks or so. Find the full list at globallyminded.org
3 December 2020 — Online — Chesmal Siriwardhana Memorial Lecture by the Centre for Global Mental Health: Global, regional and national response to COVID-19: protecting and promoting mental health
Dr Fahmy Hanna, who is leading the World Health Organization's (WHO) mental health and psychosocial support response to the COVID-19 pandemic, will give a keynote lecture on the global response. Additional presentations from Dr Mohammed Abdulaziz from the Africa CDC, Addis Ababa and Giselle Dass from the University of Colombo and COMGAP-S, Sri Lanka, on the response in their regions, followed by a panel discussion exploring the factors that have facilitated and hindered the promotion of mental health.
I have worked on the COMGAP-S research programme since 2018, and I briefly knew Chesmal. His written work, which is alive in academic publications that continue to be read and cited, is distinct with its clarity, honesty, urgency and commitment to helping underserved populations. Learn more about the COMGAP-S programme, led by Dr Shannon Doherty (ARU) and Giselle Dass, at our page here.
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. Unless otherwise stated, I have found out about them through job sites, social media posts, other newsletters and such, so I have no more information on them than publicly available.
No experience necessary
Some experience (2-5 years) necessary
External Relations Coordinator at StrongMinds Mental Health Africa
Psychiatry Faculty Position - Global Mental Health at George Washington University
Psychiatry Fellowship in Global Mental Health Delivery at Partners in Health
Peter J. Braam Research Fellow in Global Wellbeing at Oxford University
Project Manager/Research Coordinator - Global Mental Health Database at Oxford University
Project Manager/Research Coordinator - Global Mental Health Database
5+ years of experience necessary
Resources in Global Mental Health
A section for various opportunities, databanks, information sources that may prove helpful
Spotlight on the William James College Scholarship (US residents only): Serving the Mental Health Needs of the Underserved Scholarship at the Center for Multicultural & Global Mental Health. “The scholarship reflects WJC’s commitment to promoting social justice and addressing mental health disparities among historically marginalized groups in the U.S. The highly competitive scholarship, which covers 2/3 of tuition costs, recognizes the achievements and promise of students committed to pursuing Master’s (MA), Certificate of Advance Graduate Studies (CAGS) or Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) degrees at WJC.”
COVID-MINDS is a network of longitudinal studies on the global mental health impact of Covid-19, funded by the Wellcome Trust. The network “links together studies from countries around the world, supporting the sharing of protocols and data, the harmonisation of mental health measures, and the dissemination of findings to policy-makers and health bodies. We are also collating empirical research on mental health as it is published and sending fortnightly newsletters to help researchers stay up to date.”
The COVID-MINDS newsletters are very instructive even if you are not working on such a study, and they list opportunities to get involved or get in touch. Furthermore, it’s perhaps the first true application of the “global” part of global mental health, in that the studies included are taking place in all sorts of countries - low-, middle-, high-income. (Although it would be interesting to analyse the locality of the core teams in each study.)
Latest 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.
A landmark study into mental health research funding (link to full report) by the International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders found only a small amount of funding is awarded and spent in the low- and middle-income countries.
The executive summary is illuminating about the neglected areas - according to the research, in terms of stages of mental illness, prevention is badly underfunded, while basic research gets the lion's share; in terms of categories, suicide and self-harm are underfunded, despite carrying a very high burden of years of life lost; in terms of age, studies on young people and the elderly are underfunded. LMIC get little domestic investment. The study concluded that about a relatively stable 3.7 billion US dollars (overwhelmingly coming from government) on average is spent per year on mental health research. Based on 2019 population, that makes about 50 US cents per person in the world, but differs between regions: from 8.506 US dollars per person in the USA, to 0.008 US dollars per person in low- and middle-income countries.
The research listed a few limitations: difficult to analyse mental health research as part of comorbid conditions; there is not enough transparency and information on sociodemographic participant breakdown; of note, research between 2015 and 2019 was analysed. Also, neurogenerative and neurological diseases (such as dementia conditions and traumatic brain injury) were excluded, as well as research into health behaviours.
A large retrospective study on cohorts drawn from health systems data in the USA on psychiatric disorder and COVID-19 found a bidirectional association.
Are we cresting the pandemic? We hope so, but we ought to look ahead and plan all the same, which means learning whether anecdotal evidence of increased mental ill health after surviving COVID-19 indicates an arising syndemic situation. This study used data for 69.8 million patients from the USA healthcare system to match a cohort of patients with COVID-19 to six cohorts of patients with other health events occurring at about the same time. This appears to be the first such study and the detailed result section is well worth a read. Two findings made an impression on me: the increase in sequelae after COVID-19 is biggest for anxiety disorders, but any health event, not just COVID-19, happening after 1 April 2020 was likely to lead to an increase of psychiatric sequelae in patients. Important limitations include the retrospective nature, which may not have captured all data pertaining to an individual case, the fact that the increase found may come from more detailed assessments post-COVID-19, the methodology of diagnoses made and any residual confounding. We will certainly have to wait for more investigation into the mental health consequences of patients after COVID-19, but we don't have to wait to plan interventions for an anxious world.
*Social view image courtesy of Pexels.
The Language Corner
I love languages. I speak only English and Bulgarian fluently, but have studied, formally or by myself, German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Arabic and Japanese. If you also find them interesting, enjoy this Language Corner, which will rely on interactions with you, the readers, to build an entertaining little multi-way dictionary of global mental health terms. Needless to say, terms don’t always translate equally well and might evoke different emotions in the different languages.
This edition’s question: How do you say ‘global mental health’ in various languages? Send me your contributions and I will publish them in the next newsletter.
Here are the ones I know:
global mental health [‘globәl ‘mentәl helӨ] — English
الصحة العقلية العالمية [alṣaḥa alʿqalīa alʿalamīa] — Arabic (read right to left)
глобално психично здраве [globalno psihit͡ʃ no zdrave] — Bulgarian
Hi Gregana, great job with the newsletter and good luck! The translation you’ve provided in Arabic is the literal translation for “mental” as in brain/cognitive health. The correct translation for mental health is “الصحة النفسية”. Xx