A fund ready for donors. The Global Mental Health Fund provides mentors and funding to health programs in low and middle-income countries to establish and assess psychiatric rehabilitation models that are tailored to the unique needs of each community.  

Where the problem lies

85% of the world’s population live in low and middle-income countries (LAMICs) which do not have models to provide psychiatric rehabilitation to people experiencing mental health challenges.

Help is on the way

Donations will provide grants to these countries to innovate and measure services and outcomes and will primarily impact people with significant mental health challenges. The work will be facilitated through personal contacts between clinical and program research grantees and Fund advisors and their partners from leading academic institutions in better resourced countries.

Fund grants will yield program model descriptions, pilot data on clinical population, services and outcomes to aid in increasingly better quality, more efficient growth of rehabilitation services and infrastructure in underserved areas around the world.

The Global Mental Health Fund’s first grant was awarded to Padhar Hospital, a rural Lutheran multi-specialty mission hospital located in Betul District of Madhya Pradesh, roughly equidistant from Bhopal and Nagpur.

Project “Shifa” is a Community Mental Health (CMH) project at Padhar Hospital, and is designed to screen, identify and facilitate treatment and community re-integration of patients with mental illnesses and epilepsy in a specified target area of 75 poverty-stricken villages within a radius of less than 30 km around Padhar Hospital.

It is currently running on a limited budget financed entirely by personal donations from well-wishers. The project activities include building awareness of mental health issues and epilepsy in the target community, door-to-door screening by field workers using a specially designed screening tool, weekly outreach clinics (on Wednesdays) by the team including the consultant psychiatrist in selected village settings, provision of free medications on site for patients with severe mental illnesses and epilepsy, referral of patients with less severe mental health issues to Padhar hospital for more pharmacological and/or psychotherapeutic interventions or consultations with other departments, fostering community re-integration of patients and their families in the field, facilitating practical community-based research to improve service provision, and a mechanism to follow up patients receiving medications in the field on a regular basis.