It has been estimated that as many as 9 out of 10 people with mental illness globally do not receive mental health treatment. Closing this “treatment gap” has been the central mission of the field of global mental health (a sub-field of global health, led predominantly by psychiatrists) over the past two decades.

In this talk, Dr Roberts will present findings from her research in rural Madhya Pradesh, India, and compare this with evidence from other settings, to show why the goal of “closing the treatment gap” needs revising to better meet the needs of people living in poverty. She will argue that we need to pay more attention to the social context in which mental illness arises, learn from public health approaches, and divert resources towards interventions that address the social, political, and economic determinants of suffering.

Dr Roberts will then introduce her current research project that aims to identify neighbourhood characteristics that promote or hinder recovery in diverse areas of Trinidad, and present preliminary findings on what building mental healthy communities could involve in this context.

Tessa is a British Academy-funded Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Society & Mental Health at King’s College London. She completed her PhD at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), with a mixed methods research project exploring barriers to the uptake of mental health services as part of the PRIME programme. Tessa joined the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) in 2018, and has worked on INTREPID II, a multi-country research programme on psychoses led by Professor Craig Morgan, as well as completing an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship to consolidate her PhD research. Her current project explores the role of neighbourhood social environments in influencing the course of psychosis.