Investment increase will further six mental health care initiatives in developing countries

Grand Challenges Canada recently announced a significant scale-up investment, matched by partners, in several mental health care projects in developing countries

The scale-up follows a successful pilot project in Kenya that enlisted traditional African healers, faith healers and community health workers to detect mental illness.

Grants of $4.1 million Canadian will more than double by contributions from Grand Challenges Canada partners, totaling $8.7 million, according to a press release.

The Kenya initiative is one of six innovations in Africa, Asia and Haiti that will receive investment increases due to effectiveness of their pilot projects for mental health issues in low-resource countries.

The scale-up will enable the Africa Mental Health Foundation to develop referral networks and expand integration of mental health into existing public and community health services by training formal and informal health care providers, including nurses, clinical officers, traditional healers and faith healers.

In Zimbabwe, an inexpensive and effective technique to treat depression and other mental illness symptoms among individuals with HIV/AIDS will expand to 14,000 additional individuals in 2016 due to the scale-up.

The technique, called the Friendship Bench, will be introduced at 60 primary health care clinics in Harare and two neighboring cities.

In Uganda, 90 health care workers and 180 lay health workers who provide HIV/AIDS care in rural areas will be trained to characterize and deliver Group Support Psychotherapy for depression. These efforts are expected to improve depressive symptoms, increase self-esteem, social support and functionality in 70% of individuals; increase economic productivity in 50% of individuals due to more livelihood assets and fewer disability days; and decrease poverty among 20% of individuals.

In Vietnam, an adult depression program will be improved and implemented in 32 communities across nine provinces, potentially increasing access for 4,250 individuals with depression. Of these, 1,280 are expected to experience improvement within the next year.

In Pakistan, the Human Development Research Foundation will introduce a program to train 300 individuals and screen more than 27,000 families for developmental disorders, potentially improving functionality and decreasing emotional and behavioral problems in 3,000 children.

Over a 15-month transition to scale, Zanmi Lasante, a large non-governmental health care provider in Haiti, will refine its “5x5 model” by providing supplemental health care training to 100 staff. The provider expects to improve monitoring, evaluation and supervision systems and treat an additional 3,500 patients.

“People with mental illness in the developing world are too often simply ignored or hidden in a bleak darkness rather than helped. It has been a privilege to support these groundbreaking projects since their inception, to see the convincing evidence of their positive impact, and now to help scale up the success of six bold ideas which will improve the health of tens of thousands of people,” Peter A. Singer, OC, MD, MPH, FRSC, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, said in a press release.