Mental health policy in 30 years of democracy: challenges and opportunities for change
Date: 19 June 2024
Time: 17h00 to 18h30
About the webinar: In the democratic era, South African mental health policy has adopted the human rights and primary care principles that are endorsed by the World Health Organization and other international agencies. However, there have been major challenges with the implementation of these policies, and tragedies like the Life Esidimeni disaster have marred the landscape of mental health care. In this talk, Professor Lund will review the development and implementation of mental health policies in the 30 years of South African democracy and identify key policy and research challenges facing the country in the present. He will also highlight key opportunities and reasons for hope, made possible by emerging new data on innovations in the delivery of mental health care in low resource settings, and by the leadership shown by people with lived experience.
Professor Crick Lund, PhD, is Professor of Global Mental Health and Co-Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health, Health Services and Population Research Department, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He is also Honorary Professor in the Alan J. Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town (UCT). He trained as a clinical psychologist at UCT in the mid-1990s and subsequently worked on a research team to develop post-apartheid norms for mental health services for the national Department of Health. He worked for the World Health Organisation (WHO) from 2000 to 2005, on the WHO Mental Health Policy and Service Guidance Package and has consulted to several countries on mental health policy and planning. He was a founding member of the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health at UCT and served as its first Director, from 2010 to 2017. He was the CEO of the Programme for Improving Mental health care (PRIME), a DFID funded research consortium that developed models for integrating mental health into primary care in low resource settings (2011-2019) and Principal Investigator of the Africa Focus on Intervention Research for Mental health (AFFIRM) U19 NIMH Collaborative Hub (2011-2016). He is currently Co-Principal Investigator of the ‘Improving Adolescent mental health by reducing the impact of poverty’ (ALIVE) Wellcome Trust funded collaborative award (2021-2026). His research interests lie in mental health policy, service planning and the relationship between poverty and mental health in low and middle-income countries. He has published over 320 peer reviewed journal articles and 30 book chapters.