Minding Global Mental Health: Empowering the (Extra)Ordinary with Vikram Patel
In this episode of See See by Ceci, we’re joined by Vikram Patel, global mental health leader, psychiatrist, and the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He confronts a contradiction at the heart of the twenty-first-century mind: why mental health is declining in the wealthiest nations, with record resources at hand, while some of the most effective solutions are emerging from communities that have almost none.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Professor Patel walks us through what he calls the great mental health paradox and its two roots: a reductionist system that answers suffering with a prescription, and an individualism in which “disconnection is like a virus.” He traces the asylum and the diagnostic manual; fifty years and tens of billions of dollars that have yielded no biomarker and no new drugs; the loneliness epidemic; the grip of poverty and inequality; and India’s rise in youth suicide. Then comes his own answer: the community health worker, most often a woman, most often unpaid, trained to deliver a six-session treatment that cured two-thirds of people with severe depression and kept well years on.
With reflections from criminologist Stephen Schoenthaler, neuroscientists Rudolph Tanzi and John Cryan, jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, writer Andrew Solomon, psychiatrist Richard Mollica, philosophers Paul Thagard and Stephen Cave, choreographer Alexander Whitley, sixteen-year-old activist Alexander Schmitz of Young Minds for Global Health, and three-Michelin-starred chef Eric Vildgaard, the episode gathers voices you would rarely find in one room. How minds this different meet on common ground is what we leave for the listening to reveal.
This episode is about a scientist fluent in the resources of both the biomedical clinic and the community’s own healing knowledge, and about the richness of a simple truth he keeps returning to, that what makes a life well is connection, and who reminds us that when it comes to mental health, we are all developing nations. Above all, this conversation is about the most quietly radical proposition medicine can make: that the cure for much of our suffering is not somewhere out of reach, but near at hand, in the bonds we build between us.
*Vikram Patel is the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He co-founded Sangath, the Indian NGO honored with WHO and MacArthur awards, has co-led two Lancet Commissions on global mental health, and is a member of the US National Academy of Medicine. His honors include the Pardes Humanitarian Prize, an Honorary OBE, the Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, and a place on Time’s 100 most influential people (2015).
Vikram Patel, M.B.,B.S., Ph.D.
Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Head of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Professor in the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
https://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/vikram-patel
https://www.centreforglobalmentalhealth.org/about-us/our-team/professor-vikram-patel/
Recommended:
BOOK:
Where There Is No Psychiatrist: A Mental Health Care Manual (2nd ed.) by Vikram Patel and Charlotte Hanlon, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1909726834
PAPERS:
Patel, V., & Rahman, A. (2023). Empowering the (extra)ordinary. Dædalus, 152(4), 245–261. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02041
Patel, V., & Kleinman, A. (2003). Poverty and common mental disorders in developing countries. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 81(8), 609–615.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14576893
Patel, V., Saxena, S., Lund, C., Thornicroft, G., Baingana, F., Bolton, P., … UnÜtzer, J. (2018). The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development. The Lancet, 392(10157), 1553–1598. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31612-X
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31612-X/abstract
TED TALKS:
Mental health for all, by all: Vikram Patel at TEDxGateway
Vikram Patel: Mental health for all by involving all | TED Talk
Why don’t we care? | Vikram Patel | TEDxLSHTM
SANGATH:
SUNDAR ACRONYM
