World Mental Health Day

News-Medical speaks to Prof. Charlotte Hanlon, psychiatrist and researcher, about her work within the field of Global Mental Health and the importance of ...

I led the first service trial in a low-income African country for people with severe mental health conditions, showing that primary care workers could deliver mental health care as safely and effectively as mental health professionals ( [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00384-9/fulltext](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00384-9/fulltext)). Current projects include HOPE, an NIHR global health research group on homelessness and severe mental illness (co-PI with Professor Atalay Alem), SCOPE, a Wellcome Trust-funded study of the context of psychosis in Ethiopia to inform outcomes (PI), PROMISE, a Wellcome Trust-funded study on improving detection and care for people with psychosis in Malawi (PI Professor Stephen Lawrie), and PRIZE, an MRC-funded project to pilot a peer support intervention for people with psychosis in South Africa (co-PIs Dr. We've got a really exciting new project (HOPE) that is working in the area of homelessness and severe mental illness, which is a very visible problem in every country of the world, and yet still manages to be overlooked in terms of response. In HOPE, we'll be working in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Kenya with a diverse group of people, including mental health service user associations, policymakers or collaborators, and the WHO. I think seeing people supported and able to live in the community, a “rubbing of shoulders” with everybody else, is perhaps one of the key things that can help reduce stigma. There are many contributors, but I think a big contribution comes from inadequacies in providing health and social care to people with mental health conditions. The focus that we have is on shifting that center of gravity to our low and middle-income country partners because we very much recognize that global mental health needs to have really strong leadership from the global south. Because when people can access care in a timely way that meets their needs and enables them to recover, the general public can see that, and that's an extremely potent antidote to stigma. So in Ethiopia, we are doing some work with our mental health service user association, and we've got some new funds to co-develop some interventions around raising awareness and reducing stigma. A key obstacle that we face in Ethiopia, which is also a factor in many other countries, is that mental health goes hand-in-hand with poverty. So in that sense, there's quite a lot of momentum and a much stronger platform for change. That tends to involve the co-development, testing, and implementation of different sorts of psychological interventions, service models, and health systems strengthening approaches.