Vikram Patel, who will be one of the plenary speakers at this year's ACBS World Conference, was named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. The article, which can be found here, describes Dr. Patel as “a gifted psychiatrist, a dedicated researcher, a successful author of books and academic papers, and [an] effective communicator. In fact, he seems to have an unending supply of these critical skills.” Dr. Patel was the Founding and Joint Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health which states as its mission “To close the treatment gap for people living with mental, neurological and substance use disorders in low resource settings.” Specifically, the center conducts research concerning prevention, treatment, and care for mental, neurological, and substance abuse disorders in low resource settings.
Currently Dr. Patel is the Joint Director of the Centre for Chronic Conditions and Injuries at the Public Health Foundation of India. Additionally, he works with Sangath, a mental health research NGO he co-founded in 1997 and which won the MacArthur Foundation's International Prize in 2008. Dr. Patel is author on over 250 original research articles and was editor of the influential Lancet series on global mental health (2007) and its second series on the same subject (2011), as well as two authored books including "Where There Is No Psychiatrist", a mental health care manual for non-specialist health workers, which is widely used in developing countries.
We are excited to have Dr. Patel as a plenary speaker at this years World Conference 13 where he will be giving a talk entitled “Designing psychological treatments for scalability: Lessons from global mental health.” You can find his abstract for the talk below.
We hope you will be able to join us for Dr. Patel's talk at this year's conference in Berlin!
Abstract: Empirically-supported psychological treatments (EPT) are amongst the most effective of mental healthcare interventions but are not accessible in most countries and populations, especially to low income populations and in low-and middle income countries. This is, in part, due to the very nature of the process of development of EPT which typically begins in highly specialized academic centres, are trialled on patients who are attending mental health clinics (and thus already have a ‘psychological’ explanatory model) mostly drawn from a narrow socio-cultural group, and relies on specialized, but scarce and expensive, mental health professionals for delivery. Not surprisingly, disseminating these treatments in the ‘real-world’ of communities and non-specialized healthcare settings, with their diverse populations, many of whom use explanatory models distinct from those of mental health practitioners, and relying on non-specialist health workers for delivery, poses formidable challenges. This presentation will draw on the experiences of studies carried out by innovators in low resource settings in developing countries, including PREMIUM, a ‘Program for Effective Mental Health Interventions in Under-resourced Health Systems’ led by the author in India. The goal of these innovators is to design a methodology for the development of PTs which are defined by their property of scalability, viz., that they are sensitive to the context of the population in which the PT will be used, and are feasible for delivery by non-specialist health workers, i.e. health workers who do not have any prior training in mental health. Based on these experiences, this presentation will seek to address the following key themes: the barriers to dissemination of EPT; how these barriers have been addressed by global mental health practitioners; the methodology the PREMIUM program which has led to the design of new treatments for severe depression and harmful drinking; and the lessons which inform the key conceptual and methodological principles to engineer psychological treatments for scaling up.