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July 7th 2021

• Upcoming Mental Health Related Webinars
• Opportunities & News

“How Did I Get Here?” Career Paths in Mental Health Series
GMH@Harvard Webinar Series

Tuesday July 13th 11:30am-12:45pm ET 

We are excited to reintroduce a successful webinar series from fall of 2020! Join us by registering here! 

The purpose of the panel webinar series is to highlight and learn from the career paths of individuals who have been successful in diverse aspects of global mental health work. These seminars will seek to connect students and interested individuals to professionals in the field by understanding their career paths and how their passion and experiences led them to pursue a career in global mental health. It also serves to encourage individuals to find their own path in the global mental health community.

The structure will be a facilitated panel discussion of three-four individuals who will be asked questions about their experience and advice they have for students and early career professionals. There will also be time for audience questions and discussion.

Free Daily Live - Online Mindfulness Sessions 
Hosted by: Cambridge Health Alliance
In light of COVID-19, Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) Center for Mindfulness and Compassion offers free guided daily online practices. These practices are secular and open to all. Sessions include Mindful Movement, bringing kindness to our stress, anxiety, grief and fear, Weekly People of Color (POC) Mindfulness Practice, Mindfulness Practice for Addiction Recovery, Mindfulness of Breathing, Mindful Movement in Spanish and Mindfulness Practices in Portuguese. We look forward to you joining us!

See the Schedule, as well as more specialized offerings, here. 

Congratulations to GMH@Harvard's EMPOWER team & Collaborators!
Below excerpt is from HMS News press release: 

A $10 million Lone Star Prize was awarded to Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute for its competition entry, the “Lone Star Depression Challenge.”

In collaboration with the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care at UT Southwestern Medical Center, and The Path Forward for Mental Health and Substance Use, the Meadows Institute aims to increase the rate of recovery from depression in Texas from less than 10 percent today to more than 50 percent through early detection and treatment in primary care.

The Lone Star Prize, awarded by Lyda Hill Philanthropies and managed by Lever for Change, is a Texas-based competition that was launched in early 2020 to find and fund bold solutions focused on building healthier, stronger communities.

Vikram Patel, the HMS Pershing Square Professor of Global Health, and Steering Committee Chair of GMH@Harvard will lead the HMS portion of the collaboration. He will use the EMPOWER initiative to deploy a suite of digital tools to train, supervise, and support community health workers in delivering brief, psychological treatments that have proven effective for treating depression in primary care and community settings around the world. 
 

“We’re at the start of a journey to build the world’s community-based mental health force, which is essential for addressing the vast unmet need for high quality mental health care,” Patel said. “Our initiative uses both established and novel digital tools to leverage decades of clinical and implementation research, giving community health workers the power to implement evidence-based treatments for patients with depression.”

“The Lone Star Depression Challenge is a fantastic opportunity to build a project at scale in one of the largest states in the U.S.,” Patel said. “Ultimately, we hope our approach will greatly expand the footprint of the existing mental health care system into the community, in particular reaching those who have historically had limited access to mental health care, and show the potential of this innovation to help millions of other people around the nation and around the world.”

Paul Farmer, chair of the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, offered heartfelt congratulations for Patel and to the other collaborators in the Lone Star Depression Challenge, noting that the prize rightly acknowledges the importance of addressing mental health as a matter of highest importance.

“Every careful study of the afflictions that burden communities, regardless of how they’re bounded, shows that mental illness is at the top of list, while resources to address it remain the lowest of our priorities,” Farmer said. “From India to the United States, Vikram has sought to correct this mismatch, not only by calling it out but by developing effective, safe, inexpensive, and novel community- and family-based interventions to address this imbalance. The world has reason to join us in celebrating this prize.”

In Texas today, an average of eight to ten years passes before depression is diagnosed after symptoms emerge. Because of this, fewer than 1 in 15 of the 1.5 million Texans suffering from depression each year receive sufficient care to recover.

The Meadows Institute says that once fully realized, the Lone Star Depression Challenge will free Texans affected by depression by scaling clinical solutions in health systems, empowering marginalized communities to achieve equitable outcomes, and harnessing purchaser-driven market forces to accelerate adoption of these changes. The Lone Star Prize will enable the collaborators to combine and scale up three innovative programs.

Message & Resources from Dr. Michelle Funk, WHO
Dear colleagues and friends,

We are pleased to announce that the response to the 10 June launch of the WHO guidance on rights based community mental health services was overwhelmingly positive, with close to 7000 people viewing the event via Zoom or the WHO YouTube account to date. The launch received significant attention both in social and traditional media and we have also received many positive comments and feedback from individuals from all corners of the world. 
 
Furthermore, since the launch, hundreds of people in countries from around the world are keeping the momentum going by extensively disseminating the WHO guidance to their networks and governments. We would encourage you all to do the same. Please find below some of the key links to the WHO Guidance documents and to resources related to the launch event itself which we would encourage you to share with your networks and contacts:

• WHO Guidance and Technical Packages -  Please disseminate widely!
• WHO Press release in ENGLISH - SPANISH - RUSSIAN (Other languages will follow)
• WHO Feature story- Community-based mental health services using a rights-based approach
• Telegraph Article - Seclusion, restraint and coercion: abuse 'far too common' in mental health services across the world
• Video poem: The Power of Purpose - Community-based mental health care: the Power of Purpose
• YouTube livestream of the WHO Launch event

Finally a big thank you to you all for your interest and commitment to this area of work, and to improving and transforming mental health services everywhere.
 
Best wishes
Michelle

Dr Michelle Funk
Unit Head, Policy, Law and Human Rights Unit (PLR)
Department of Mental Health and Substance Use, 
World Health Organization

Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Mental Health Research 
The Boston University Medical Campus (BUMC) – Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Global Psychiatry Clinical Research Training Program (T32) invites applications for a full-time Postdoctoral Fellow in global mental health research. The fellow will receive three years of dedicated mentorship to complete a mentored research project at an international training site in Barbados, Ethiopia, Peru, South Africa, Uganda, or Ukraine in topics such as addictions, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, PTSD/trauma/complex emergency, HIV mental health, women’s health, and childhood disorders. Note: Candidates must be a citizen or a noncitizen national of the United States or have been lawfully admitted for permanent residence at the time of appointment. For more information click here. 

The Pamela Sklar Psychiatric Genetics and Neuroscience Fellowship
The fellowship is sponsored by the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute and is designed to build bridges between clinical training and the development of a research career by providing the opportunity for advanced study and research.

The fellowship is open to residents who are training in psychiatry residency programs associated with Harvard Medical School (HMS) and with several other academically and scientifically strong residency programs.  Acceptance into the Fellowship is contingent upon the candidate being accepted into the laboratory of a Stanley Center PI (or close collaborators) and the candidate's willingness to relocate to the Boston area. Mentors who are collaborators, but not members of the Stanley Center can be approved by the Stanley Center Steering Committee. The award provides support for one year following residency training, with the possibility of applying for a one year extension .