Ali Giusto
Columbia University Medical Center Leveraging Family and Community Strengths to Create Sustainable Mental Health Treatment in Low and Middle Income Countries: Applications and Future Directions
Interventions targeting families and caregivers may be critical for improving youth mental health outcomes and family problems, such as family conflict, particularly in low resource settings. Further, fathers are often excluded in family treatments, but successfully engaging fathers in these treatments could be a “game changer” in the field of child and adolescent mental health. Family treatments coupled with innovative implementation approaches represent promising avenues for tackling the global burden of mental health. In this interactive talk, implementation and engagement lessons learned from two intervention studies delivered in Kenya by lay providers will be discussed. One is a family therapy study and the other a father substance use treatment. The discussion will focus on how lay counselor implementation approaches and how family-focused intervention work with men and boys can be adapted to different mental health interventions across contexts. Next, future directions for developing scalable, contextually relevant treatments that target family-level problems to improve child and adolescent mental health in low resource global settings will be discussed. A light lunch will be served during this talk. Ali Giusto is a candidate for the Population Health Initiative Joint Hire position in Psychology and Global Health. This lecture is free. No registration needed. |