Global Mental Health and Well-Being Initiative
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An interdisciplinary coalition of faculty, staff and students at Georgetown University to conduct research, develop pedagogy, and engage in informed activism and advocacy to improve mental well-being and psychosocial outcomes locally, nationally, and globally.
We envision global mental health and well-being with a expansive and inclusive framing. With mental health, we incorporate constructs of well-being and flourishing, alongside ideas and experiences of distress and suffering. Simultaneously, we adopt a more fluid and inclusive definition of global to recognize how global flows of power, people, information, and things, are constantly in flux, and how global and local are irrevocably connected in an ever-globalizing world.
News and Updates
New Grants:
Upcoming Speaker Series: "Impact of Climate Change on Economic Outcomes and Risk of Suicide: Results from the ACCLIMATE study in Bangladesh."
Art Campaign: From Ill-being to well-being and the liminal states in-between
Community Engagement
Upcoming Project: Healing Spaces Mural Project
SOH Partnership Event: Student mental health care packages
World Mental Health Day, 2024: A Video Message from Georgetown Students
Every Hoya cares! These caring Hoyas share their thoughts for World Mental Health Day. If you or someone you know is looking for mental health support, check out the resources on our Every Hoya Cares page
New Publications
"Mindfulness Intervention with African-American Caregivers at a Head Start Program: An Acceptability and Feasibility Study" In Mindfulness by Matthew Biel
"Trust, individualism, and the logics of care in middle America during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic" In Transcultural Psychiatry by Emily Mendenhall
"An Unsustainable Life: The Impact of Heat on Health and the Economy of Bangladesh" by Shabab Wahid
Featured Research Projects
ACCLIMATE
The Assessing the risk of Climate Change on popuLatIon Mental and physicAl healTh outcomEs - ACCLIMATE - study seeks to examine the role of emotional dysregulation and sleep disruption as potential mediating mechanisms between climate related stressors such as heat and humidity and adverse mental health outcomes in Bangladesh. The study will also examine if climate related stressors are connected to higher risk of suicide, and if such stressors have a role in synergistic interactions between mental health conditions and a range of physical illnesses.
Ecological Grief in Kenya
This study is conducting ethnographic research in Kilifi, Kenya exploring perceptions of community members around ecological grief in response to loss/degradation of the surrounding environment, anticipated future losses, and disruptions to local knowledge systems, and potential connections of environmental distress with more serious conditions such as depressive and anxiety disorders.
RESTORE Senegal
The RElief from STress via sOcial pRotEction - RESTORE - study is a pilot feasibility cluster randomized controlled trial of the Self Help Plus intervention in Senegal. It seeks to understand local idioms of distress, mechanisms of stigma, and lived experience of distress and disorder in rural and urban Senegal. Using this knowledge RESTORE will culturally adapt, implement, and assess the feasibility and acceptability of a community-based mental health intervention called Self help Plus, to be delivered by trained nonspecialists and integrated into existing social protection and poverty reduction initiatives.