How MHIN started

Our mission

There is a growing commitment within the global mental health community to develop, test and scale up innovations aimed at the promotion of mental health and the prevention and treatment of mental, neurological and substance use disorders.

MHIN aims to nurture this commitment and accelerate progress toward implementation of innovations with the ultimate goal of improving the lives of people with these disorders.

Our objectives

Knowledge synthesis: To share learning and expertise by collating and synthesizing information and ideas related to the development, content, evaluation and scale up of global mental health innovations

Knowledge exchange: To facilitate the scale up of innovations through the provision of appropriately packaged information and its timely transfer to relevant stakeholders

Background

Over the last several years, donors have supported an increasing number of global mental health research initiatives, with a special focus on the generation of evidence in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). These donors include, for example, the UK’s Department for International Development, the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institute for Mental Health and The European Union, as well as Grand Challenges Canada (GCC).

Thanks to these new resources, the number of innovations is rapidly increasing. MHIN has been established to support the knowledge needs of this fast-growing community. It represents an effort to build partnerships between diverse stakeholders and initiatives, and to synthesize and disseminate the knowledge that they have and will generate, and formulate the practical know- how for scaling up of what works best.

Milestones

In December 2013, MHIN launched its first micro-site to accompany the World Innovation Summit for Health Report "Transforming Lives, Enhancing Communities: Innovations in Mental Health". The report highlighted examples of innovations from around the world which met the challenge of delivering comprehensive treatment and care for mental health problems in community settings.

The original MHIN micro-site enabled readers to browse key information on the content and impact of over 50 innovations from around the world.

The website you're visiting today is an expansion of this original micro-site, which now includes more innovations, an entire area devoted to compiling and sharing resources relevant to global mental health, and a community space to better enable sharing of knowledge and experiences between members to accelerate global mental health innovation.