Global Mental Health Care & the Empower Initiative: A Conversation with Dr. Vikram Patel, Psychiatrist and Endowed Professor at Harvard Medical School

When it comes to treating depression, it's the rest of the world that is delivering health care innovations to the United States. The global burden of unrecognized and untreated depression in terms of suffering and lost productivity is staggering. This is not just true in economically developing countries, but in the United States as well. A lack of broad access to affordable, effective, quality-based mental health care is a universal problem. In recent years, innovative research has driven the development of treatment strategies for depression, with the bulk of this work occurring in under-resourced areas of the world such as India and Africa. Much of this research, and its application has come from the scholarly work of Dr. Vikram Patel, a UK-trained Psychiatrist and Endowed Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Patel's work has focused on the burden of mental health problems across the life course, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment.  

Dr. Patel speaks with Paul about these challenges and possible solutions provided by the Harvard-sponsored ‘Empower Initiative’ program, which is a model for improving depression care at the community level. This multi-dimensional, holistic, and humanistic approach is now being brought to Texas in the form of the "Lone Star Depression Challenge". Using strategies honed in rural communities worldwide, the project seeks to make depression care more widely available via the use of front-line health workers using evidence-based digital treatment tools. In our third episode of Season 2, focusing on health equity, Paul and Vikram delve into these topics, describing a potential roadmap to reducing the global burden of depression into the 21st Century.