Year in Review; Global Mental Health in 2018

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Posted: 13th December 2018

2018 has been an exciting year for MHIN and for global mental health.

This year we saw the global community coming together to collectively raise the profile of mental health worldwide as well as generate a concerted push for the uptake of and action on evidence that has been collected thus far on best-practice interventions for mental health.

5,000 Members

We reached a landmark 5000 members (and rising!) on the Network and saw a rise in content submission from our members accounting for a total of 180 innovations, 320 resources and 290 organizations. We are proud to host the amazing work of innovators, researchers, implementing agencies and mental health stakeholders and showcase what they are doing to improve mental health in their countries, advocate for rights and alleviate stigma.

Collaborations

This year, we also introduced a new website feature called ‘Collaborations’ to introduce more comprehensive knowledge packages on the platform for the uptake of evidence into practice. Our most notable examples of this are the Arctic Council and National Institute of Mental Health’s initiative the ‘RISING SUN Toolkit’ and International Medical Corps’ Mental Health Integration Toolkit for Humanitarian Settings. We are excited to be hosting such amazing resource repositories on our platform and extremely appreciative of the partnerships we have forged with collaborators along the way.

Our ‘Collaborations’ section also allowed us to dedicate a space to our regional hubs, MHIN Africa and our newly launched MHIN Latin America and the Caribbean.

MHIN Africa

MHIN Africa, our portal to all Africa-related MHIN activities on the website, embodies a user-friendly interface to allow users to easily access content and resources. Check out the launch blog here.

MHIN Latin America and the Caribbean

This year, on World Mental Health day we also launched our second regional hub to highlight and feature mental health innovation, resources and communities from Latin America and the Caribbean (MHIN LAC)! The MHIN LAC hub appeals to a Hispanophone audience and so we have started to invest in Spanish translations for existing and upcoming content. The latest hub also lives within the ‘Collaborations’ page next to MHIN Africa and other examples of productive partnerships and interdisciplinary approaches within the global mental health field. In this blog, Matias Irarrazaval marks the launch of MHIN LAC and details the need for stronger networks within the region.

World Mental Health Day 2018

This year, MHIN was proud to be working with United for Global Mental Health as one of the dissemination partners for the seminal Lancet Commission for Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development that launched on World Mental Health Day on the 10^th of October. The Lancet Commission released a report that built on the 2007 and 2011 Lancet series on global mental health that paved the way for more coordinated action and priority for mental health worldwide.

As part of this work, we dedicated an online space to the Commission’s findings and promotional assets, published a policy brief highlighting key recommendations from the Lancet Commission (English, French and Spanish) and reached out to innovators from the MHIN community to help support the dissemination of these findings in their World Mental Health Day events. Innovators from Africa, Asia, Middle-East and Latin America all played an important role in promoting the Commission’s recommendations for actions on mental health to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

This World Mental Health Day also marked the landmark Global Ministerial Mental Health Summit in London. We attended this event and promoted our work at a stall collaboratively with our partners from the Centre for Global Mental Health. The Summit produced recommendations for policy makers as well as a Declaration and was held with the aim to harness the collective energy of the global mental health community for action on policy.

Our work with United for Global Mental Health on the mental health advocacy component of their campaigning efforts also led to the development of a series of policy briefs targeted to certain global events during the course of 2018 and continuing into early 2019. For the United Nations General Assembly ‘Time To Act for Global Mental Health’ event, we produced a policy brief on ‘Mental Health and the Sustainable Development Agenda’ as well as a synthesis of key recommendations for protecting the human rights for people with mental illnesses for Human Rights Day on the 10^th of December 2018.

Our 4^th Birthday

This year, MHIN turned 4. But we would be nothing today without our global community and our partners. It is thanks to the collective strength and continued dedication of our members that we are able to progress and move forward as one of the leading knowledge management platforms for the field of global mental health. In the coming year, we aim to continue featuring the amazing work being implemented globally to improve mental healthcare for all as well as focus more on initiatives working to serve vulnerable populations in humanitarian settings and young people.