Sonia Chehil

A United Nations General Assembly Special Session for Mental, Neurological, and Substance Use Disorders: The Time Has Come

Vikram Patel and other global mental health leaders call for a special session of the UN General Assembly to discuss and debate action needed on mental, neurological, and substance use disorders, which have been left off the international NCDs agenda.

Packages of care for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in low- and middle-income countries.

In the sixth in a series of six articles on packages of care for mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries, Alan Flisher and colleagues discuss the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

An integrated program to train local health care providers to meet post-disaster mental health needs

This paper describes a post-disaster mental health training program developed by the International Section of the Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) and delivered in Grenada after Hurricane Ivan struck the country in September 2004. This train-the-trainer program used an integrated community health model to help local health care providers develop the necessary skills for the identification and evidenced-based treatment of mental disorders occurring after a natural disaster. The approach also provided for ongoing, sustainable mental health care delivered in the community setting, as advocated by the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization. This approach is in contrast to the largely ineffective and costly vertical whole-population psychosocial counseling activities that have often been used in the Caribbean following natural disasters.

Attributes of a Successful Professional Exchange: The 2007 International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) Cincinnati Group

As part of the 2007 International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) Leadership Exchange and Conference, an international group of professionals met at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. The focus of this exchange was the behavioural health workforce, leadership projects, and models of leadership and policy. As a part of this leadership exchange the working group (Cincinnati Group) developed the following action plan. The group set as our agenda the production of some tangible projects and useful guidance for IIMHL. These are summarised in this article.