About EMPOWER

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The Challenge EMPOWER strives to address

The global mental health crisis continues to escalate, bearing significant consequences for those with mental illnesses, their loved ones, and society. Those who shoulder a disproportionately large burden of suffering include children and adolescents, low-income individuals, and historically marginalized groups—these individuals face tangible hurdles to accessing quality health care.

Despite the abundance of evidence showing that psychosocial interventions can prevent and treat a wide range of mental health problems, there is virtually 0% coverage globally.

The current efforts to build the mental health workforce and address the escalating need rely on in-person training and expert supervision. These methods are resource intensive and impossible to scale. We need a radically different approach to address this crisis, which emphasizes science, scalability, and equity.

The Opportunity

We’re positioned to have a massive impact on the delivery of mental health services globally because of several key enabling trends:

The opportunity - recognition

Mental health is recognized as an urgent area of action in most countries & UN Sustainable Development Goals

The opportunity - non specialist providers Non-specialist providers can deliver brief evidence-based interventions with a high degree of fidelity

Digital training, supervision and delivery of brief psychological treatments is effective, and access to technology is increasing globally

The opportunity - peer to peer model

Peer-to-peer models for supervision are effective for quality assurance

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The EMPOWER Solution

EMPOWER presents a digital solution designed for anyone to learn, master, and deliver quality-assured psychosocial interventions. The team's focus is on capacity building across different organizations such as health systems, schools, amongst others, to prevent and manage mental health problems, across the life course, on a global scale. EMPOWER achieves this by deploying cutting-edge digital training, supervision, and quality assurance tools, empowering care providers to effectively learn, master, and deliver evidence-based psychosocial interventions.

Leveraging Data for Impact

At the core of the initiative is a commitment to harness emerging data. The team utilizes this data to evaluate the impact of scaling up mental health services and to cultivate a deeper understanding of the components that make psychological interventions effective. EMPOWER is not just revolutionizing mental health care; but is also advancing the knowledge and strategies needed to create lasting, positive change in mental well-being across diverse populations.

Meet the EMPOWER Team

Vikram Patel, MBBS, PhD
Lab Director
Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

John Naslund, PhD
Lab Co-Director
Instructor in Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School