Seminar/Webinar: Poverty and Mental Disorders

Crick Lund, BA (Hons), MA, MSocSci (Clinical Psychology), PhD, is Professor and Director of the Alan J. Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town. He is currently CEO of the PRogramme for Improving Mental health carE (PRIME), a DFID funded research consortium focusing on the integration of mental health into primary care in low resource settings in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, South Africa and Uganda, and Principal Investigator of the AFrica Focus on Intervention Research for Mental health (AFFIRM) U19 NIMH Collaborative Hub. He trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Cape Town and was subsequently involved in developing post-apartheid norms for mental health services for the national Department of Health. He has also worked for the World Health Organisation (WHO), on the development of the WHO Mental Health Policy and Service Guidance Package, and consulted to Lesotho, Namibia, Indonesia, South Africa and Zimbabwe on mental health policy and planning. His research interests lie in mental health policy, service planning and the relationship between poverty and mental health in low and middle-income countries.

 

Rochelle Ann Burgess (PhD) is a Lecturer in Health and Social Care in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at London Metropolitan University. Rochelle is a critical community and health psychologist who specialises in Global Public Health. She holds a BSc (Honours) in Developmental Psychology from McMaster University (Canada), and a MSc (distinction) and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. Her PhD explored local narratives of mental distress among HIV/AIDS affected women in South Africa, which included an ethnography of services designed to support women in the contexts of poverty, power and global partnerships. Her current research interests include: community based approaches to Global Mental Health; social determinants of mental health; gender and health; global social inequality; participatory and ethnographic approaches to evaluation; global health governance; and critical approaches to global health. She has particular interests in the importance of local social action to tackle the broader social inequalities that shape health outcomes for vulnerable communities, and the role of psychology in understanding and tackling social inequality in the UK and beyond. Rochelle is a research associate with the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) of University of KwaZulu-Natal, and member of the Health, Community and Development Research Group, LSE, amongst other affiliations

 

Maëlenn Guerchet is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Global Observatory for Ageing and Dementia Care, at King’s College London, which review, synthesise and disseminate evidence in the field. After an MSc in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, her PhD and post-doc researches (Tropical Neuroepidemiology Unit, University of Limoges, France) focused on dementia in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her work mainly involved the estimation of prevalence of dementia in three-french speaking African countries (Benin, Central African Republic and Congo), and the study of factors associated with dementia in those countries. She has participated to several field studies in West and Central Africa, and coordinated a multicenter population-based survey in both rural and urban Central Africa. Now, she is working with the 10/66 Dementia Research Group, which carries out population-based research into dementia, non-communicable diseases and ageing in low and middle income countries.