Professor Melanie Amna Abas

Professor Melanie Amna Abas is a psychiatric epidemiologist and Professor of Global Mental Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London and Consultant Psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS trust.

Melanie’s early research funded by the MacArthur Foundation was on the social origins of depression in women in Zimbabwe. This was the first to show a common mechanism for the development of depression cross-culturally through the experience of life events involving humiliation and loss. She then moved to applying interdisciplinary methods to epidemiological research on measurement of depression, and its treatment, in cross-cultural settings, especially in Zimbabwe and also in Thailand, Moldova, Sri Lanka and among minority groups including vulnerable women migrants and trafficked people in the UK.

Melanie now leads the 'Scalable Global Mental Health Interventions' research team (Scalable@GMH) which focusses on cultural adaptation and clinical trials of contextually-appropriate task-shifted interventions for depression and anxiety, especially in low and lower-middle income African countries. As well as studying effectiveness and implementation, her research aims to understand how such interventions work and what works best for whom. The team also researches behavioural interventions to improve adherence to treatment for long-term conditions, especially HIV (TENDAI project), uptake of HIV self-testing and promotion of self-care in women with antenatal depression. The goal is to produce regionally relevant evidence, in equitable partnership with researchers and people with lived experience of mental disorders from the global south, which changes policy and ultimately improves mental and behavioural health for people living in the poorest countries. The team collaborates closely with the Friendship Bench through which they have had major policy impact. Melanie is Joint Director, with Prof Dixon Chibanda, of an NIHR Global Health Research Group called African Youth in Mind (total value £2.7m), and Chief Investigator for the TENDAI clinical trial in depression and HIV funded by the US NIMH (total value US$4m).

Capacity building is core to her work, with a focus on early and mid-career researchers from underrepresented groups. She has worked on African-led capacity building programs since 2010 including the US-African Medical Education Partnership Initiative across 13 African medical schools 2010 – 2019. Melanie is the KCL partner for the African Mental Health Research Initiative (2016 – 2022; 2023 - 2027) which is led from the University of Zimbabwe as part of the Science Foundation for Africa 'Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science Initiative', supported by the Wellcome Trust. With Abiodun Alao, Melanie co-chairs the KCL African Regional Network.

Melanie completed her medical training at the University of Birmingham before receiving her MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and her doctorate from the University of Auckland. She is a member of the UK Royal College of Physicians and the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Research interests

• Cultural adaptation and Clinical Trials of scalable interventions for depression and other common mental disorders deliverable by non-specialists in low-resource settings.
• Research at the interface between mental health and priorities for the global south including women’s health, education, and ending the HIV epidemic.
• Early intervention and remission of depression in low-resource settings
• Behavioural interventions to improve adherence to treatment for long-term conditions, especially HIV.
• Equitable research partnerships between the global north and the global south; decolonisation and research fairness.
• Research capacity-building.

Teaching

Melanie regularly teaches and supervises students on topics related to Global Mental Health including: cross cultural measurement, psychiatric epidemiology, development and adaptation of interventions for depression and anxiety, aspects of depression in low and middle income countries, grant writing, scaling up mental health services, ethics of research in low resource settings, on the following courses:

MSc Global Mental Health

MSc Affective Disorders

BSc Neuroscience

MSc Mental Health Studies

Expertise and public engagement

Melanie is a member of the Wellcome Trust Populations and Public Health Advisory board, and a faculty member of the UK MRC Applied Global Health Board. She is scientific advisor to the University of Washington, Behavioral Research Center for HIV and an editor on the International Editorial Board of the British Journal of Psychiatry. She previously sat on the Wellcome Trust/MRC/DFiD Joint Global Health Trials committee, and on the Wellcome Bloomsbury Tropical Health Policy Group. Melanie has published articles in Newsweek and in the Association of Commonwealth Universities review; her work has featured in the Guardian and Washington Post and on NPR radio, BBC World Service and CNN news.