London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Teaching faculty from the two institutions include many of the leaders in the new discipline of Global Mental Health, including Prof Vikram Patel (LSHTM) and Prof Martin Prince (King’s Institute of Psychiatry).

Starting in September 2012, the MSc in Global Mental Health can be taken either full-time for one year or part-time for two years.

The course aims to provide people with the knowledge and the skills to initiate, develop and oversee mental health policies and/or programmes in low resource settings, and to conduct and critically evaluate research on Global Mental Health.

By the end of the course, the students will have acquired an understanding of the challenges to providing accessible and effective mental health services in low resource settings, and will be equipped with the knowledge and the tools to work towards reducing the global burden of mental, neurological and substance abuse (MNS) disorders, which comprise about 14% of the global burden of disease.  Yet, in low- and middle-income countries, which contain about 80% of the world’s population, the great majority of people with MNS disorders do not receive treatment because they lack access to adequate care.  Reducing this “treatment gap” will require a new generation of experts who will take on the challenges of improving and expanding mental health services in low resource settings.

LSHTM co-director of the course Dr Alex Cohen says: “Despite increasing evidence of the burden of mental illnesses and the comparative lack of the mental health services in low‐ and middle‐income countries, the topic of Global Mental Health has not been taken up by academic public health institutions.  This course represents a great step towards addressing this gap in the public health curriculum.”

Dr Melanie Abas, the co-director at King’s Institute of Psychiatry, says: “Although similar courses have been launched in Portugal and Cape Town, they are mainly distance-learning based. This is the first face-to-face taught MSc in Global Mental Health ever established. It will yield the next generation of mental health experts working in policy, practice, planning and research on a global scale.”

More information about the programme and how to apply can be found here.

Further details can be found via the following links:-

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus/graduate/global-mental-health

http://www.centreforglobalmentalhealth.org/

http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/masters/msgmh.html