Mental Health

The purpose of ""Mental Health Beyond Facilities"(mhBeF) is to develop and implement a sustainable, holistic community based model of care for people with mental disorders. The Mental Health Beyond Facilities Project (mhBeF) aims to provide a comprehensive community based mental health services package. It will be implemented in Uganda, Nepal and Liberia. If successful, people with severe mental disorders will lead symptom free, stigma free, economically productive lives.

Although Rwanda boasts a progressive health policy environment, public sector funding for mental health care is limited. There are very few psychiatric resources in the country, leaving limited capacity to provide services at the community level, where the burden of mental illness is most severe. This can lead to loss of productivity and general economic insecurity.

The new screening app, a $300 device, could dramatically raise the global level of diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy, a problem that affects 1 in 100 people — 65 million worldwide, an estimated 80 to 90% of them in developing countries, of which at least 60% go untreated.  The high incidence of epilepsy in developing countries is attributed to higher rates of head injuries and certain infections, including cerebral malaria.

About 45% of 800,000 citizens of the Union of Comoros live below the poverty line.

Ghana has developed Continuous Quality Improvement methods (CQI), which are helping to reduce child mortality and other health problems.

Primary healthcare givers making bi-monthly home visits to patients will be trained to identify and treat epilepsy, a novel approach to compensate the country’s acute shortage of doctors. The workers will be supported by neurologists via mobile phone. This project receives additional funding from Sanofi.

After the 2010 earthquake, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have become major barriers for many Haitians, as they strive to live productive lives and to contribute positively to economic recovery and development. The gap between the needs in the field and the available resources for mental health is alarming and marked by a shortage of trained professionals, a lack of integration between formal and informal mental healthcare providers and a long tradition of spiritual beliefs that attribute the causes of mental disorders to curses and spirits.

The project, supported by Lagos State University College of Medicine, is aimed at bridging the treatment gap for depression in Nigeria. The overall purpose of the project is to evaluate the clinical and cost effectiveness of a collaborative stepped care intervention based on the mental health gap intervention guidelines (mhGAP-IG) for non-specialist health professional management of depression in Lagos, Nigeria.

In Rwanda, 10 years after the 1994 genocide, an estimated 28% of the population suffers post-traumatic stress disorder.  Nursing and mid-wife students in Rwanda will be trained in mental health issues —  to identify, for example, mothers who need referrals for depression.  The team will provide training in maternal mental health to community health workers, who will support new mothers in targeted communities, conducting weekly home visits for six months.  Helping new mothers through depression will reduce a major contributor to child malnutrition.

In Peru, neuropsychiatric disorders are a leading cause of disease burden but, as in most low- and middle-income countries, such problems are largely unrecognized and untreated.