Together to Transform: a mutual learning platform to develop a social paradigm for global mental health

Together to Transform unites mental health practitioners, activists, caregivers, and people with lived experience within the framework of an online mutual-learning platform. The project’s collaborators come, in part, from longstanding academic and non-academic partnerships in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ghana, Colombia, Palestine, Kosovo, India, Nepal, racially marginalised communities in the UK, and Canadian Indigenous communities.

Together, we will work to advance the shift in Global Mental Health (GMH) towards a social paradigm by creating a “Global Learning Network.” This platform will develop a common language for research and action on the social dimensions of mental health in equal partnership with our global community partners. It addresses two urgent, interrelated problems: (1) divergent notions of the “social” across disciplines and (2) power imbalances that persist between researchers and community partners, and between the global north and south.

What do we mean by a social paradigm for mental health?

The academic field of GMH has begun to shift its paradigm from promoting individualized treatment to researching the social causes of mental ill health, e.g. poverty, inequality, violence and their inter-relationships. This shift towards a social paradigm has been called for by scholars from the social sciences, social epidemiology, and transcultural psychiatry, alongside calls to consider how communities themselves contribute to knowledge and action on mental health and its determinants. Despite this shared and growing interest across disciplines, there are still big differences in what we mean by “social” influences on mental health, which prevents academics from different disciplines and community practitioners from effectively communicating and collaborating to promote better mental health, Our primary aim is to undertake the conceptual work that this paradigm shift requires, across knowledge and power divides between qualitative and quantitative researchers, those from the global north and south, and between academic and non-academic actors.