ISBM 2025 WEBINAR SERIES – Scaling up psychosocial interventions: from evidence to policy

Scaling up psychosocial interventions: from evidence to policy – Dr Vikram Patel

A mental health crisis is evident in many countries, regardless of their mental health human resources or spending. The mental health system is dominated by specialty care, and most care is provided at the stages of clinically diagnosed disorders, neglecting early interventions and long-term recovery focused interventions. This paradigm of care must shift towards adopting a system-wide change with empowerment of front-line, community-based providers to deliver evidence based psychosocial interventions as the foundation of mental health care. This lecture
will describe the evidence in support of this approach, its strengths and an overview of the EMPOWER program which is building a suite of digital tools, resources and methods to rapidly build the capacity of a front-line workforce to learn, master and deliver evidence-based psychosocial interventions.

Vikram Patel is the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He also holds honorary Professorships at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Public Health Foundation of India. He co-leads the Department’s Mental Health for All lab and co-leads the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative. His 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. He is a co-founder of the Movement for Global Mental Health, the Centre for Global Mental Health (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), the Mental Health Innovations Network, and Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the WHO Public Health Champion of India and the MacArthur Foundation’s
International Prize. He served on the Committee of India’s first National Mental Health Policy and the WHO High Level Independent Commission for Non-Communicable Diseases. He co-led the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health & Sustainable Development and the Lancet- World Psychiatric Association Commission on Depression.