Integrating Mental Health Into Existing Health Services

With Will Troy from Flourishing Minds Fund

TRANSCRIPT

CMHI: We're really excited about opportunities that take this layering or integrated approach. What that means, basically is we look for opportunities where we can layer mental health screening and treatment services onto existing global health infrastructure. Basically, the idea there is just to get the most bang for your buck. You don't need to worry about finding the population that are suffering from mental illness.

Will Troy: You don't need to worry about, you know, we're talking about people that are often living quite remotely not coming into contact with lots of public health infrastructure. So if you have an opportunity where you can find a population that already is coming into contact with medical clinics it's much easier to identify sufferers. So to give an example, HIV infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa is very well utilized by a large portion of the population.

And it's also, a population that is suffering from really high rates of common mental disorders. So it's really, cheap and effective to layer on mental health screening and treatment for this population that's already coming into the HIV clinics very regularly. We have been funding CHAI, who does a lot of work in this area. It's the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

They do great work. Also last year we funded Taimaka. They're a malnutrition organization working in Nigeria. They're looking into something similar. So the idea there, just as another example, is they have work with mothers of children who are severely malnourished. And so you have these mothers, they're bringing in their malnourished children for nutrition treatment for 8 to 12 weeks.

You can screen these mothers for depression and give them treatment over that 8 to 12 weeks. And it's just an incredibly cheap and effective way to get sort of double impact there.