Professor Charlotte Hanlon

Biography

Dr. Hanlon is a psychiatrist and epidemiologist who has lived and worked in Ethiopia for over 10 years. Dr. Hanlon’s PhD examined the public health impact of maternal common mental disorders on the mother and child in rural Ethiopia. She co-established a birth cohort which has been followed up to date. Dr Hanlon’s current work focuses on health service and system interventions to improve population access to mental health care. She was research director on the Program for Improving mental health care (www.prime.uct.ac.za), PI of a health service trial for people with severe mental disorders (www.affirm.uct.ac.za) and is Co-I for a WHO field trial of caregiver skills training for children with developmental disorders. Dr. Hanlon is interested in applying lessons learned from mental health care to other aspects of health care: in the ASSET project (www.healthasset.org) she is working with colleagues from maternal, surgical and NCD care to develop and evaluate health system strengthening interventions. Dr. Hanlon helped to establish a PhD programme in mental health epidemiology at Addis Ababa University and is Ethiopia PI for the AMARI capacity-building grant for PhD and post-doctoral fellows. Dr. Hanlon co-edited the revision of Where There is no Psychiatrist with Professor Vikram Patel. 

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

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