２．Acting early: the key to promoting mental health across the life course

【Presenter】

Vikram Patel
Harvard Medical School, USA

Vikram Patel is Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine in the Blavatnik Institute's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

He co-leads the Department’s Mental Health for All lab and co-leads　The GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative. His work has focused on the burden of mental health problems across the life course, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment.

He is a co-founder of the Movement for Global Mental Health, the Centre for Global Mental Health (at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), the Mental Health Innovations Network, and Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the WHO Public Health Champion of India prize and the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize.

He is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences and member of the US National Academy of Medicine. He served on the Committee which drafted India’s first National Mental Health Policy and the WHO High Level Independent Commission for Non-Communicable Diseases.

He co-led the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health & Sustainable Development and the Lancet- World Psychiatric Association Commission on Depression; he serves as co-chair of the Lancet Citizens Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. He was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.

【Chair】

Toshi A Furukawa
Kyoto University

【Abstract】

The most consistently demonstrated risk factor for poor mental health across the life course is the experience of adversities, typically related to deprivation and violence, during developmentally sensitive periods of early childhood and adolescence.

This lecture will consider how the well-described social determinants of mental health exert some of their effects through these early life developmental pathways.

The lecture will then use an ecological model to describe the implications of this science for the promotion of mental health and consider the potential for a range of evidencebased interventions, from income support and social protection to parenting and mental health interventions.