MEET DR. VIKRAM PATEL

Vikram Patel helps bring better mental health care to low-resource communities — by teaching ordinary people to deliver basic psychiatric services.

Dr. Vikram Patel is a Professor of International Mental Health and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (UK). He is the Joint Director of the School’s Centre for Global Mental Health. He holds honorary Professorial appointments with the Public Health Foundation of India, the Institute of Psychiatry (UK), Dalhousie University (Canada), the University of Melbourne (Australia) and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal).

He serves on a number of advisory committees including the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Expert Advisory Group for Mental Health; the Technical Steering Committee of the Department of Child & Adolescent Health; the Institute of Health Metrics & Evaluation (USA); the South Asia Network for Chronic Diseases Control (India); the George Institute of International Health (Australia); and the board of Sangath, a community based NGO in India that he founded. Sangath won the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008.

Dr. Patel has also won many personal awards including the Rhodes Scholarship, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Leadership Development, and three consecutive Wellcome Trust fellowships. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the UK and won the Chalmers Medal from the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine & Hygiene in 2009. His bookWhere There Is No Psychiatrist (Gaskell, 2003) has become a widely used manual for community mental health in developing countries. He was the lead editor of the Lancet Series on Global Mental Health (2007) and the PLoS Medicine series on packages of care for mental and neurological disorders in developing countries (2009), and a co-editor of the Lancet series on promoting universal health care in India (2011). He led the efforts to set up the Movement for Global Mental Health which was launched on October 10th, 2008 (www.globalmentalhealth.org).

Dr. Patel is based in Goa, India where he leads a program of public health research and capacity development with Sangath, the Public Health Foundation of India, and other partners focusing on three broad areas: child development, adolescent health and mental health.

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