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Courses in Global Mental Health

GHP 204/ SM 519.0: Foundations in Global Mental Health

  • Course Description: The course is intended to cover the key role of mental health in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals, which have recognized mental health explicitly in two of the health goal targets and implicitly in several others (such as universal health coverage and conflict). The course curriculum is informed by the publication of the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health & Sustainable Development, which has proposed a theoretical reframing of mental health and series of innovative actions to achieve the aspirations of the SDGs in relation to mental health. Along with the “Case Studies in Global Mental Health Delivery” course offered in Spring 2, this course will form the core of a proposed Global Mental Health Intensive Fellowship program at HSPH, in collaboration with HMS. This course is an HSPH course cross-listed at Harvard Medical School

GHP 208/SM 518.0: Case Studies in Global Mental Health Delivery

  • Course Description: Case Studies in Global Mental Health Delivery was launched during the 2018-2019 academic year, as part of a new initiative on global mental health and sustainable development at Harvard. This initiative is intended to foster a community of students and faculty who are passionate about promoting a broad perspective on mental health as a fundamental public good and a universal human right, as captured in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and a forthcoming Lancet Commission on this topic. The agenda is to promote an inter-disciplinary life course approach to promoting mental health, preventing mental disorders and enabling the recovery from mental disorders, through a combination of teaching, technical consultancy, building a community of students and faculty, and collaborative research.The Case Studies course aims to present a diverse array of programs demonstrating how interventions for prevention, treatment and recovery across the life course are delivered in real-world settings in both low and high-income countries. The overall goal is to demonstrate how the core principles of access, equity, evidence and scalability are addressed in each case, to understand the barriers in the implementation of the intervention and the innovative strategies used to address them, and the learnings from the successes and failures of these efforts. For case studies in the greater Boston area, we may also offer students an opportunity for the session to be conducted ‘on-site’. We anticipate a selection of Case Studies that illustrate these diverse principles and objectives, and facilitate learning how similar programs may be run in diverse contexts. Classes will be primarily discussion-based, and students will be expected to read the case studies and any relevant readings in advance. This course is an HSPH course cross-listed at Harvard Medical School