The scandal of mental health care in developing countries has been well documented, and surveying it, you could be forgiven for thinking the solution is straightforward: These countries just need to train more psychiatrists and mental health professionals of the type you’d find in the US.
But that’s too simplistic. Yes, training more mental health specialists will be part of the answer for these nations. But what’s most interesting is that developing countries have also figured out a new way to tackle the deficit in mental health care — and it could hold lessons for the developed world as well.
Specifically, these nations have been serving as a proving ground for a model called community-based care, where non-specialist providers or lightly trained laypeople — picture someone like your grandmother, not a doctor — deliver brief mental health interventions in informal settings like homes or parks.
Whereas importing Western norms can alienate local populations, who may not view mental health problems as medical, brain-based problems, community-based care has found acceptance because it pays attention to cultural context. Lay counsellors meet patients where they are — both literally, in terms of physical space, and conceptually, in terms of their beliefs about mental health.
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This model has turned out to be not only cheap to operate and easy to scale, but also incredibly effective for treating issues like depression. So effective, in fact, that the model is now being exported to the US, which stands to learn a lot from these poorer countries.
