I think that studying this course was the best decision I've ever made
walking through those doors and seeing London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
and knowing that I'm walking into an institution
that has invited me to become a world changer, like everyone else i think who is
attending here.
One of the wonderful things about the course is that's taught between two very
strong institutions so at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
you have leaders in epidemiology and
and things like biostatistics, these public health disciplines that LSHTM is
really known for
but you still have that specific mental health perspective from the King's
College Institute of Psychiatry
and you can draw off the resources of them both. The course was created
because this is a field that's really been neglected
in academic public health. The course
is not intended as clinical training,
it's very specifically a public health course
looking at systems of care, doing research
on the development and evaluation of interventions, looking at the social
determinants
of disorder, looking at the challenges
to creating systems of care. The summer project is a really exciting opportunity
to
kinda apply what you've learned in terms of skills throughout the course to
real-life projects. People from our course did projects all over the world
in
Africa and Europe and the UK. My project specifically focused on
monitoring and evaluating community mental health programs in Nigeria
So right now I'm working on a mental health intervention
for Nigeria. We're looking at trying to implement mental health first aid
which is fast responses within the workplace and in the community
to mental health issues, whether that would be depression, anxiety,
how to identify mental health issues and what to do afterwards.
We've had a remarkable cross-section
of students from different disciplines
We have people from psychology,
psychiatry, nursing, anthropology,
geography, just a wonderful range
of interests among the students which makes
the discussions really dynamic and exciting.
I think the thing that I value the most about the course was
the sense of community. We had
pizza parties, we had our post statistics pub crawls, we had
international dinners at each others houses after
school and on the weekends. I feel like I saw some of the
course members seven days a week
and having that kind of community I think is important, and also
rare in new fields like global mental health. I would
unequivocally recommend the course to others who were interested
in mental health, particularly in low and middle income countries but also in
high-income countries. I think it
gives you the resources and the perspective that you need
to think about how we scale up accessible
effective mental health services in a variety of settings and I think that's
always very useful to
have that sort of focus. This course helped me
tremendously I mean this past year
changed my life. It changed my view.
I came in passionate I really did,
but I finished the masters even so much more passionate, felt on fire.
This is what's going to be the start of my life.
This is the fire I needed to really
jump up, and start, and change the world.