Faculty of the Global Mental Health Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital are working to improve the quality and delivery of mental health care in resource limited settings by sharing knowledge and expertise in psychiatric care delivery. Currently, neuropsychiatric disorders account for about one-quarter of the global burden of disability but in most low-income countries the extreme shortage of mental health specialists has led to a gap of up to 90 percent between treatment need and available mental health services.
Our mission is to strengthen the delivery of quality mental health care across the globe by educating and training psychiatrists and other mental health specialists, as well as non-specialist clinicians, in the care of patients with mental disorders in low income settings, and by developing infrastructure and training for mental health research linked to service delivery in under-resourced areas.
We are actively engaged in the following projects:
- A partnership with Partners in Health (PIH) to build the local capacity of mental health service delivery and integrate mental health care into community-based care systems in Haiti, Rwanda, Malawi, Peru, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Lesotho, Russia and the Navajo Nation.
- Collaboration with PIH and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School to evaluate the clinical outcomes of the public sector mental health system in Rwanda.
- Collaboration with the Academic Consortium for Rwanda’s Human Resources for Health Program (HRHP), a partnership of the Government of Rwanda, the United States Government (USAID), and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to build psychiatry professional education and post-graduate psychiatric training in Rwanda.
- Education of psychiatry and non-psychiatric residents in the United States and abroad via didactic teaching, seminars, and educational mentorship to build the knowledge and skills sets necessary to provide mental health services in low- and middle-income countries.
