{"id":1207,"date":"2022-08-29T15:00:35","date_gmt":"2022-08-29T22:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/uwgmh\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2024-01-15T10:15:35","modified_gmt":"2024-01-15T18:15:35","slug":"gmh-newsletter-featured-topics-july-august-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/uwgmh\/2022\/08\/29\/gmh-newsletter-featured-topics-july-august-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"GMH Newsletter Featured Topics – July\/August 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"

UW Consortium for Global Mental Health Spotlight<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Helen Jack, a new GMH junior faculty member, about her current work and plans for the future.\u00a0 While Helen has recently joined the faculty, she has a long history of global mental health research activity.<\/p>\n

\"\"Can you tell our readers a little about what brought you to Global Mental Health?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I started doing global mental health research as an undergraduate at Yale, when I conducted senior thesis research in psychiatric hospitals in Ghana, studying recruitment and retention of mental health workers. I started working in Zimbabwe when I connected with Dr. Khameer Kidia<\/a>, a Zimbabwean researcher, while studying at Oxford and we began doing research together in Zimbabwe, a collaboration and friendship that continues to this day!<\/p>\n

I chose to become a primary care physician, in part, because of my commitment to expanding access to mental health and substance use treatment \u2013 much of that treatment can be delivered in primary care, and we need primary care voices to be part of making that change.<\/p>\n

I finished residency in Internal Medicine at University of Washington a little more than a year ago, and I now split my time between research and primary care practice. My research focuses on mental health systems strengthening and capacity building, primarily in Zimbabwe, and on substance use treatment in the United States, with a focus on peer-delivered interventions. My clinical practice is general adult primary care in a state prison in rural eastern Washington where I am also involved in a number of quality improvement initiatives.<\/p>\n

Can you tell us a little about your global mental health research? Who are you working with and how did the project get started?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the projects I\u2019m currently working on is with a group at University of Maryland that is implementing brief psychological interventions for people with substance use disorders that are delivered by peers, people who have lived experience with substance use and recovery. They are rolling out these peer-delivered therapies in Baltimore, Maryland and Cape Town, South Africa, as two separate projects, and they did a series of qualitative interviews with patients who received the therapy in each site. While there has been a fair amount of theoretical work on the importance of mutual capacity building, we have identified no prior studies that lay out frameworks or methods for this mutual learning. I am leading a study to combine the qualitative datasets from each site into a single set of qualitative interviews and analyze them jointly bot to learn more common elements and challenges of peer support and to begin to develop a set of methods for mutual capacity building.<\/p>\n

\u201cMutual capacity building<\/a>\u201d is the idea that people in high-income countries and people in low and middle-income countries can support each other to solve a common problem, such as lack of access to behavioral health services. This contrasts with development aid, which typically goes from high-income countries to low and middle-income countries, and with reverse innovation, which involves implementing ideas from low and middle-income countries in higher resource context, but which can parallel extractive and colonialist transfers of resources. I\u2019m working with a team from University of Maryland to develop methods for doing research and implementation that are more grounded in mutual capacity building.<\/p>\n

Prior to starting this project, I had collaborated closely with the PI of the University of Maryland lab, Dr. Jessica Magidson, PhD<\/a> to do some conceptual work on mutual capacity building. We were interested in this because we both do both global mental health and US-based research and found that the two were increasingly informing each other. After she collected this data, we thought it would be a great opportunity to try to delve further into these concepts.<\/p>\n

What do you see as the potential impact of your project?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I hope that we can highlight some lessons learned for people who are implementing peer-delivered interventions to improve both clinical efficacy and implementation. I also hope that our methods will give other researchers a tool for doing similar joint analyses and provide a concrete way for researchers to engage in mutual, bidirectional learning.<\/p>\n

What is the current status of this project?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

We have completed analyzing the joint dataset and just submitted our first manuscript outlining the method and some of our findings.<\/p>\n

In closing, can you share a bit about other projects and what you’re planning for the next couple of months?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am eager to start doing more research in a criminal justice setting, informed by both my clinical work and my prior global and US-based research. Later this year, I am excited to begin a research project looking at access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV in patients releasing from prison in Washington State who have mental health or substance use disorders. This is funded by a supplement grant to UW BIRCH<\/a> and I am co-leading it with Dr. Susan Graham<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Global Mental Health News<\/strong><\/h2>\n