Professor Charlotte Hanlon

Professor Charlotte Hanlon is Co-Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health at King’s College London, together with Professor Crick Lund. She also co-directs the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Mental Health Research and Training at the IoPPN with Dr Tatiana Salisbury.

Professor Hanlon lives and works in Ethiopia. She first went to Ethiopia from 2004-2006 to carry out her PhD work on the public health impact of perinatal mental health in a rural Ethiopian setting. She returned to Ethiopia in 2009 and has been involved in clinical work, training mental health professionals, service development and policy, alongside her research work.

The main focus of Professor Hanlon’s research is on developing, testing and implementing interventions that seek to improve the lives of people with mental health conditions in low- and middle-income countries. This includes psychological interventions, broader social/psychosocial interventions, interventions to increase involvement of people with lived experience, service models and system strengthening approaches. She has a particular interest in working with people affected by severe mental health conditions, including psychoses and developmental disabilities. Capacity strengthening is an integral part of all her projects. She co-ordinates the PhD programme for Mental Health Epidemiology at Addis Ababa University.

Professor Hanlon's current projects include HOPE, an NIHR global health research group on homelessness and severe mental illness (co-PI with Professor Atalay Alem); SCOPE, a Wellcome Trust-funded study of the context of psychosis in Ethiopia to inform outcomes (PI), PROMISE, a Wellcome Trust-funded study on improving detection and care for people with psychosis in Malawi (co-I, with PI Professor Stephen Lawrie); and PRIZE, an MRC-funded project to pilot a peer support intervention for people with psychosis in South Africa (co-I, with co-PIs Dr Laura Asher and Dr Carrie Brook-Sumner). She is also country PI on SPARK, an NIHR funded cluster randomised controlled trial of WHO’s caregiver skills training for children with developmental disabilities in Ethiopia and Kenya (PIs Dr Rosa Hoekstra, Professor Amina Abubaker).

Professor Hanlon was a commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Ending Stigma and Discrimination in Mental health. She is co-lead (with Professor Ashok Malla) of the interventions, services and systems section of the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Psychoses in Global Context.

Research Interests

• Health systems and implementation research in LMICs 
• Trials of mental health care interventions and service models in LMICs 
• Public mental health  
• Women’s mental health 
• Involvement of people with lived experience in system strengthening 
• Cultural validation of measures 

Teaching

• Global Mental Health MSc

Expertise and Public Engagement

Professor Hanlon is a member of the technical working group to oversee scale-up of mental health care in Ethiopia.