Symposium 43 - Sustainable solutions: Building mental health interventions to last through community-engaged approaches

Friday, November 17, 2023

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM PST

Location: Hoh (601), Level 6

CE: 1.5

Keywords: Community-Based, Implementation, Global Mental Health
Level of Familiarity: Moderate
Recommended Readings: Giusto, A., Jack, H. E., Magidson, J. F., Ayuku, D., Johnson, S. L., Lovero, K. L., ... & Wainberg, M. L. (2022). Global Is Local: Leveraging Global Mental-Health Methods to Promote Equity and Address Disparities in the United States. Clinical Psychological Science, 21677026221125715., Triplett, N. S., Woodard, G. S., Johnson, C., Nguyen, J. K., AlRasheed, R., Song, F., ... & Dorsey, S. (2022). Stakeholder engagement to inform evidence-based treatment implementation for children’s mental health: a scoping review. Implementation Science Communications, 3(1), 1-16., Puffer, E. S., & Ayuku, D. (2022). A community-embedded implementation model for mental-health interventions: Reaching the hardest to reach. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(5), 1276-1290., Shelton, R. C., Cooper, B. R., & Stirman, S. W. (2018). The sustainability of evidence-based interventions and practices in public health and health care. Annual review of public health, 39, 55-76.,

Chair(s)

Savannah Johnson, B.S., M.A. (she/her/hers)

Phd Candidate
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina

Discussant(s)

GN

Gabriela Nagy, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

Assistant professor
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Presenter(s)

Savannah Johnson, B.S., M.A. (she/her/hers)

Phd Candidate
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
AG

Ali Giusto, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University Medical Center
Delray Beach, Florida
KL

Kathryn Lovero, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
New York, New York
NT

Noah Triplett, M.S. (he/him/his)

Graduate Student
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington

Partnership building and local collaboration are key for sustainable solutions in global mental health (GMH) and advancing mental health equity. Community based participatory research (CBPR) offers one approach to work toward these goals, addresses health inequities by actively involving community members in the research process. Community partners can enhance the research process by contributing local expertise that directly impacts intervention success and sustainability. CBPR emphasizes the importance of engaging with community partners during each phase of the research process, from treatment development through implementation and scale up. By working together at each step of the process, researchers and partners can co-create more acceptable and sustainable solutions.

We present four examples of GMH projects that engage with multiple types of community partners and are implemented across the education, religious, and health care sectors. Projects span the treatment development to implementation pipeline and highlight critical points for collaboration that promote sustainability and center community needs at each phase. The first talk presents the steps and benefits of engaging a Community Advisory Board (CAB) from the start in the co-creation of an intervention for adolescent mental health and violence prevention in rural Kenya. We also present examples of community collaboration during the actual implementation of task-shifted interventions. Task-shifting expands access to mental health care by training non-specialist providers to implement mental health interventions. In the second presentation, the research team engages community stakeholders to identify the barriers and facilitators of implementation of a task-shifted intervention that addresses father depression and alcohol use in Kenya. In the third talk, local stakeholders collaborated as part of the research team to co-design implementation strategies and adapt a group intervention for integrated adolescent depression services in Mozambican primary care clinics. Finally, researchers in the fourth presentation collaborated with non-specialist providers directly to co-develop implementation guidelines that ultimately improve acceptability, feasibility, and usability of mobile phone supervision for a group-based trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy intervention in Kenya.

Presentations will include both quantitative and qualitative data showcasing the results of the projects as well as asynchronous video reflections from community-based partners and community advisory board members offering their perspectives on community-engaged approaches. Our discussant will facilitate a conversation among all presenters on the benefits and challenges of community-engaged approaches. Our goal is to provide attendees with practical examples to improve sustainability through community collaboration across sectors and at different stages of intervention development and implementation.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the session, the learner will be able to:

Identify opportunities to engage with community partners across the treatment development to implementation pipeline.
Discuss the role of community-engaged approaches in developing the capacity to deliver evidence-based treatments in low-resource settings.
Know different strategies for engagement at various stages of implementation research process.
Understand the relationship between community-engaged approaches and sustainability.
Identify opportunities for community engagement across difference community sectors.
Understand the challenges and benefits of community-engaged research in global mental health.