Convention Main Page

Invited Address 1

Building the Workforce to Deliver Psychological Therapies Globally

Vikram Patel, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School

Vikram Patel is The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the Harvard Medical School. His work has focused on the burden of mental disorders, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment.

He holds Honorary Professorships at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, the Public Health Foundation of India, and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (where he cofounded the Centre for Global Mental Health in 2008), and is a cofounder of Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the MacArthur Foundation's International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008 and the WHO Public Health Champion of India award in 2016. He is a cofounder of the Movement for Global Mental Health. He is a Fellow of the U.K.'s Academy of Medical Sciences and has served on several WHO expert and Government of India committees, including the WHO High Level Independent Commission for Non-Communicable Diseases and Mental Health.

He has been awarded the Chalmers Medal (Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, U.K.), the Sarnat Medal (U.S. National Academy of Medicine), an Honorary Doctorate from Georgetown University, the Pardes Humanitarian Prize (the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation), an Honorary OBE from the U.K. Government and the John Dirk Canada Gairdner Award in Global Health in 2019. He was listed in Time Magazine's 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.

Participants Earn 1 Continuing Education Credit

Primary Category: Global Mental Health

Key Words: Global Mental Health, Professional Development, Digital Technology

Depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse, and trauma-related mental health problems affect hundreds of millions of people around the world. Brief psychological therapies such as behavioral activation for depression are highly effective in helping people recover. Community health workers, nurses, social workers, peers, and even lay people, can effectively deliver these therapies if they are well trained and properly supervised. Yet, more than 90% of those affected by these common mental health problems do not receive these therapies. A major reason for this is the lack of skilled providers. Currently we rely on traditional face-to-face method for training, supervising, and supporting providers. This is inefficient, costly, and impossible to scale up. This lecture will describe an initiative that aims to address this obstacle to the worldwide provision of high-quality psychological therapy by creating a digital platform to help providers learn and master its delivery. This platform will emphasize an evidence-based common elements approach to the selection of specific treatments; will support a suite of components for each psychological therapy, from training to competency assessment to supervision; and will include a range of tools to help providers manage their workload, guide therapy delivery and maintain its quality. The platform will be designed to be used by any provider worldwide and will be capable of being tailored for specific contexts, for example, through adaptation for language and cultural factors. The platform will offer opportunities for big data analytics to enable tailoring of learning and supervision to specific provider needs. The platform is a partnership between the Global Mental Health at Harvard initiative and the 7 Cups Foundation, and is guided by leading international psychological treatment and digital mental health experts.

This Invited Address is designed to help you:

• Describe how brief psychological therapies are delivered in global contexts, including the settings, providers, format, and effects;
• Describe how training and competency assessments are conducted for providers and the evidence on digital approaches for delivering these interventions;
• Discuss a new initiative that aims to transform the opportunities to learn and master the delivery of brief psychological therapies globally.

Recommended Readings:

Dunleavy, G., Nikolaou, C.K., Nifakos, S., Atun, R., Law, G., & Car, L. (2019). Mobile digital education for health professions: Systematic review and meta-analysis by the Digital Health Education Collaboration. I, e12937. doi: 10.2196/12937

Singla, D.R., Kohrt, B.A., Murray, L.K., Anand, A., Chorpita, B., & Patel, V. (2017). Psychological treatments for the world: Lessons from low- and middle-income countries. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 13, 149-181.

Invited Address 2

Transforming the Lives of Children, Parents, and Communities: Accomplishments and Future Opportunities

Matthew R. Sanders, Ph.D., The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Dr. Matthew Sanders is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the Parenting and Family Support Centre at The University of Queensland. He is the founder of the internationally recognized Triple P-Positive Parenting Program, which is now run in 28 countries around the world in 22 languages. One hundred thousand practitioners have been trained to deliver Triple P. He has published extensively in the areas of parenting, family psychology, and the prevention of social, emotional, and behavioral problems in children. He is considered a world leader in the application of public health approaches to parenting intervention. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Australian Psychological Society, New Zealand Psychological Society, Australian Association of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and the Academy of Experimental Criminology and a past Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association. He has been a consultant to the Council of Europe and the World Health Organization on Positive Parenting and is a former Queenslander of the Year. In 2018 he was awarded a Queensland Greats Award from the Queensland Government. He is a prolific publisher with over 500 publications, including: 9 books (including The Power of Positive Parenting: Transforming the Lives of Children, Parents and Communities Using the Triple P System; Oxford University Press), 72 book chapters, 326 journal articles, 31 DVDs, 85 practitioner manuals, and 3 online parenting programs. He has been involved as on-air clinician in 4 television series on parenting, including in the U.K., ITV's successful series Driving Mum and Dad Mad, and in Australia as a regular guest in a parenting spot of ABC radio in Brisbane for 5 years. He has been married to Trish for 44 years, is a father to two adult children and 5 grandchildren and is keen supporter of rugby union (particularly the NZ national team the All Blacks).

Participants Earn 1 Continuing Education Credit

Primary Category: Parenting/Families, Prevention

Key Words: Parenting, Prevention

This presentation argues that the field of evidence-based parenting support using social learning and cognitive-behavioral principles has made a major contribution to the mental health and well being of children and young people. Of all the potentially modifiable risk and protective factors associated with poor developmental outcomes, none are more important than the quality interactions between parents and children. However, the approach has vast untapped potential to address a much larger range of diverse problems experienced by families in raising their children. The emergence of a population approach combined with ongoing applications for a much wider range of child and adolescent problems has shown the application of core principles to highly effective, flexibly tailorable, and culturally acceptable in a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic contexts around the world. Ongoing innovations include the development of parenting interventions for anxiety disorders, pain syndromes, chronic illnesses, sibling and peer relationship problems, academic attainment, and serious mental health problems and neurodevelopmental disorders. The presentation will illustrate how the field has continued to evolve as a population health perspective has been increasingly adopted with low-intensity, low-cost programs (in-person and online programs) with wide population reach. The principles of minimal sufficiency and "proportionate universalism" will be illustrated to show how increasing population reach can be achieved in a cost-effective manner. At the same time programs are needed for the most vulnerable children and families. Future parenting interventions should focus on promoting self-regulation skills in both adults and children. Finally, the role of parenting programs in tackling some of the world's "wicked" problems will be discussed.

This Invited Address is designed to help you:

• Describe how innovations in the delivery of positive parenting principles has occurred to tackle a diverse range of child problems.
• Demonstrate an understanding of integrated, multilevel systems of evidence-based interventions to promote population-level change.
• Explain how parenting interventions continue to evolve to address the needs of contemporary parents and families in a culturally sensitive manner.

Recommended Readings:

MacDonell, K. W., & Prinz, R. J. (2017). A review of technology-based youth and family-focused interventions. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 20(2), 185-200.

Sanders, M. R. (2019). Harnessing the power of Positive Parenting to promote the wellbeing of children, parents and communities over a lifetime. Behaviour Change, 1-19.

Sanders, M.R., & Mazzuchelli, T. (Eds.). (2018). The Power of Positive Parenting: Transforming the lives of children, parents and communities through the Triple P system. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sanders, M. R., Turner, K. M., & Metzler, C. W. (2019). Applying self-regulation principles in the delivery of parenting interventions. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 22(1), 24-42.