Dr. Vikram Patel 

Pershing Square Professor of Global Health, Blavatnik Institute's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Co-leads the Department’s Mental Health for All lab and the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative.

Topic: EMPOWERING the (EXTRA) ORDINARY. (Patel, V. and Rahman, A., Daedalus, in press)

Abstract: Psychosocial interventions are amongst the most effective interventions for a wide range of mental health conditions but remain inaccessible to the vast majority of persons who could benefit from them, including in many high-income countries. Global mental health practitioners have demonstrated how innovatively designed and delivered psychosocial interventions can address many of the barriers which limit their scalability. This colloquium will focus on a case study of a brief behavioral activation treatment for severe depression, designed and evaluated originally in India, and its subsequent evolution and scale-up, including its ‘reverse-engineering’ for the US. Referring then to the larger literature, a central message of this colloquium is the recognition that mental health problems can be addressed effectively without a formal diagnosis, with brief interventions which comprise few or just one ‘active ingredient’, and with resources that every community possesses: persons who care for others in their communities.

Dr. Patel leads research that plays a central role in the emergence and development of the field of global mental health and that has galvanized policy, civil society, and donor action to address the large unmet need for care for people with mental disorders, both in low-and middle-income countries and in low resourced contexts of high-income countries.