Poverty, violence, and inequality have major impacts on the prevalence of mental illness and access to resources for treatment. In June this year, mental health researchers and practitioners convened at the University of Leeds for the interdisciplinary symposium ‘New Research Directions in Global Mental Health’ to form new collaborative partnerships in mental health research.
“Collaborations can enable sharing of lived experience that you can’t get through interviews, focus groups or surveys,” says Dr Matty Elliott of the University of Leeds, co-chair of the symposium organising committee. “This can lead to more patient-centered methodologies in diverse contexts, including lower-resource settings.”
The objectives for this two-day symposium were to:
- Bring together researchers in mental health from across WUN and their partners to discuss how collaborative research could and should be addressing the major mental health challenges in our societies today.
- Encourage collaboration across diverse disciplinary, cultural, and national contexts to share insights, generate new ways of thinking, innovative approaches, and methodologies.
- Address the intersectional dimensions of global mental health, considering the complex interplay between social context, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and religion in shaping lived experiences and outcomes in mental health.
The Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) sponsored event included 13 panel sessions, three participatory workshops, and six keynote speeches, exploring connections between the three core themes of poverty, violence, and inequity with mental health. 75 researchers from 14 countries[1] attended.
If you are a WUN member university mental health researcher and would like to learn more about opportunities for future collaboration, contact the WUN Secretariat at info@wun.ac.uk.
[1] Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malawi, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, South Africa, Uganda and the UK.
