Approach & Philosophy
Our mental health research begins with collaboration and thorough engagement with local partners and stakeholders, including, of course, patient representatives and potential patients. We start with a qualitative study to assess mental health care needs, focusing on patients’ wishes, system and cultural parameters and health policy leader goals.
Following these assessments, we collaboratively 1) develop a strategy to train and test evidence-based mental health care delivered by a locally available workforce and 2) evaluate strategies for scaling up mental health care in a sustainable manner. The latter includes explicit commitment of sustained support from local, national and regional health and mental health leaders.
Given that our studies typically involve populations that are under-represented in basic mental health research, we are careful to collect and analyze data on mechanism of treatment action and to develop integrated biological studies.
