Mental Health

The Home Again innovation developed by the Banyan aims to address this problem by fostering choice-based, inclusive living spaces for individuals with persistent mental health issues currently in institutions. These shared homes provide service users with informal peer support, and are linked to a range of supportive services that promote access and continuity of care for this highly vulnerable group.

The BasicNeeds model is designed to address mental illness at a community level, providing education, training, and care and bring together a network of organizations and individuals to provide better resources for the end users. The model is designed around five core modules and aims to achieve impact in the areas of capacity building, community mental health service delivery, improved livelihoods, and policy change/domestic resource mobilization.

Buena Semilla (Good Seed) is a community-based, participatory intervention that consists of women’s groups for mothers within the first 1,000 days of pregnancy and motherhood (from conception to two years postpartum).  These women are the most marginalized and vulnerable within their communities (i.e. single mothers, experience of violence, poor social support, extreme poverty, psychosocial distress) and at a high-risk of mental disorders and poor pregnancy outcomes.

Promoting a Novel Community-Based Mental Health Model in Rural Haiti and Building a National Scale-Up Plan

Depression is the leading mental health cause of the global burden of disease and global estimated costs of untreated depression are up to US $16 trillion. Psychological treatments, including those delivered by non-specialist providers (NSPs), are among the most effective interventions in medicine but remain inaccessible for the majority of the world’s population. Supervision is essential to ensure high-quality psychological treatments and is particularly relevant for those delivered by NSPs.

The implications of mental health challenges in children and youth not being addressed early are exaggerated in under resourced contexts, often leading to catastrophic outcomes for those growing up in communities surrounded by gang related crime and violence. There is therefore an urgent need to scale cost effective, community based preventive interventions for children and young people to open up access to uninsured populations at huge risk of developing mental health disorders.

Mental health (MH) conditions know no geographic boundaries, but those boundaries are critically significant when it comes to accessing care. Over 5 billion people cannot access MH care, causing immense suffering. The failure to deliver effective MH care to over 80% of people who need it represents the single most significant challenge for global MH. This failure stems from two root causes: limited human resources equipped to provide MH care, and ineffective implementation within health systems.

Depression in fathers is a neglected area globally. Rates in Pakistan are likely to be high where 23-42% of men are depressed. The aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of parenting training Learning Thru Play + Cgntv Bhvr Therapy for depressed fathers of young children (0-3yr). Fathers will be recruited from across 18 towns in Karachi. A total of 2880 father-child pairs will be assessed at baseline, 4-months and 6-months. Those in the training arm will receive12 sessions of LTP+.

People with psychosocial disabilities accessing treatment at tertiary care settings, are often at risk of long-term institutionalization, due to the conspicuous absence of pathways for reintegration into society. Home Again aims to address this need for sustainable pathways to full inclusion for people with psychosocial disabilities, particularly those with histories of homelessness who are over represented in the institutional long-stay population.

The Thinking Healthy Programme (THP) was developed in Pakistan and has been adapted to various settings, and has demonstrated success in reducing the severity of depression and improving rates of remission among women in the perinatal phase. This proposal will scale up a Liberian-adapted Thinking Healthy as an effective intervention targeting maternal mental health for women during and after pregnancy to improve maternal, birth, and infant outcomes.