Measuring depression and anxiety in sub-saharan Africa.

BACKGROUND: Despite being one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, fewer than 10% of depressed individuals in low-resource settings have access to treatment. Mounting evidence suggests that nonspecialist workers are capable of providing counseling and case management at the community level. They often use brief psychiatric screening instruments as clinical tools to identify cases and monitor symptoms over time. In order for such tools to be used in diverse settings, they must demonstrate adequate reliability and validity in addition to cross-cultural relevance. To be used to guide routine care they also need to be flexibly adapted and sensitive to change. The goal of this paper is to assess the cross-cultural validity of brief psychiatric screening instruments in sub-Saharan Africa, identify best practices, and discuss implications for clinical management and scale-up of mental health treatment in resource-poor settings. METHOD: Systematic review of studies assessing the validity of screening instruments for depression, anxiety, and mental distress in sub-Saharan Africa using Medline and PsycINFO. RESULTS: Sixty-five studies from 16 countries assessing the validity of brief screening instruments for depression, anxiety, and/or mental distress. CONCLUSIONS: Despite evidence of underlying universality in the experience of depression and anxiety in sub-Saharan Africa, differences in the salience, manifestation, and expression of symptoms suggest the need for the local adaptation of instruments. Rapid ethnographic assessment has emerged as a promising, low-cost, and efficient strategy for doing so.

Teaching "global mental health": psychiatry residency directors' attitudes and practices regarding international opportunities for psychiatry residents.

OBJECTIVE: The authors surveyed Psychiatry Residency Training Directors' (RTDs') attitudes about the role and feasibility of international rotations during residency training. METHOD: A 21-question survey was electronically distributed that explored RTDs' beliefs about the value, use, and availability of international clinical and research experiences during residency. RESULTS: Of 171 RTDs, 59 (34.5%) completed the survey; 83% of respondents rated the importance of global mental health education as 3-or-above on a scale of 1 (least important) to 5 (most important), but only 42% indicated that such opportunities were made available. The value of such opportunities was thought to lie primarily in professional development and cultural exposure, less so for enhancing core knowledge competencies. Obstacles to such opportunities included lack of accreditation, financial resources, and faculty/administrative support and supervision. CONCLUSION: RTD respondents endorsed the value of international experiences during residency, but their availability and educational impact are not fully supported.

Misconceived bioethics?: The misconception of the "therapeutic misconception".

Bioethics needs to include study of the social and historical context in which ethical meanings in medical encounters make sense. It needs to do this in order to remain relevant, vibrant, and aware of how it might unwittingly facilitate the agendas of others. As an illustration, this paper critiques some of the accepted meanings and purposes of the idea of the Therapeutic Misconception (TM) which has been an increasingly attractive concept with which to organize thinking about experimentation ethics. By considering the history of alternative viewpoints against which TM was offered as a replacement, this paper suggests that TM, and bioethics more generally, may contribute to increasingly technocratic and standardized practices in medicine.

Development and validation of a Haitian Creole screening instrument for depression.

Developing mental health care capacity in postearthquake Haiti is hampered by the lack of assessments that include culturally bound idioms Haitians use when discussing emotional distress. The current paper describes a novel emic-etic approach to developing a depression screening for Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante. In Study 1 Haitian key informants were asked to classify symptoms and describe categories within a pool of symptoms of common mental disorders. Study 2 tested the symptom set that best approximated depression in a sample of depressed and not depressed Haitians in order to select items for the screening tool. The resulting 13-item instrument produced scores with high internal reliability that were sensitive to culturally informed diagnoses, and interpretations with construct and concurrent validity (vis-à-vis functional impairment). Discussion focuses on the appropriate use of this tool and integrating emic perspectives into developing psychological assessments globally. The screening tool is provided as an Appendix.

Mental health response in Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake: a case study for building long-term solutions.

Significant challenges exist in providing safe, effective, and culturally sound mental health and psychosocial services when an unforeseen disaster strikes in a low-resource setting. We present here a case study describing the experience of a transnational team in expanding mental health and psychosocial services delivered by two health care organizations, one local (Zanmi Lasante) and one international (Partners in Health), acting collaboratively as part of the emergency response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In the year and a half following the earthquake, Zanmi Lasante and Partners in Health provided 20,000 documented individual and group appointments for mental health and psychosocial needs. During the delivery of disaster response services, the collaboration led to the development of a model to guide the expansion and scaling up of community-based mental health services in the Zanmi Lasante health care system over the long-term, with potential for broader scale-up in Haiti. This model identifies key skill packages and implementation rules for developing evidence-based pathways and algorithms for treating common mental disorders. Throughout the collaboration, efforts were made to coordinate planning with multiple organizations interested in supporting the development of mental health programs following the disaster, including national governmental bodies, nongovernmental organizations, universities, foreign academic medical centers, and corporations. The collaborative interventions are framed here in terms of four overarching categories of action: direct service delivery, research, training, and advocacy. This case study exemplifies the role of psychiatrists working in low-resource settings as public health program implementers and as members of multidisciplinary teams.

Reducing the use of seclusion and restraint in psychiatric emergency and adult inpatient services- improving patient-centered care.

The reduction of seclusion and restraint (S/R) use has been given national priority by the US government, The Joint Commission, and patient advocacy groups. It is associated with high rates of patient and staff injuries and is a coercive and potentially traumatizing intervention. The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) is the largest municipal health care system in the country, with 11 HHC facilities operating psychiatric emergency services and inpatient psychiatric services. HHC operates 1117 adult inpatient psychiatric beds with an average length of stay of 22.2 days that generated over 19,000 discharges in 2009. In 2009, there were over 36,000 psychiatric emergency services visits. HHC's Office of Behavioral Health provides strategic leadership, planning, and support for the operations and quality objectives of these services. In January 2007, the corporate office initiated the Seclusion and Restraint Reduction Initiative, with a sequenced, intensive series of interventions and strategies to help focus the behavioral health leadership and staff on the need for continued culture change toward a more patient-centered and safe system of psychiatric emergency and adult inpatient care. From 2007 to 2009, there was a substantial decline in HHC's overall rate of S/R incidents in inpatient units. The more substantial impact was in the reduced overall time spent in S/R; the reduced frequency of use of S/R; and the reduced likelihood of patient injury from S/R use.

Scaling up for the "bottom billion": "5 x 5" implementation of community mental health care in low-income regions.

Common mental disorders pose tremendous health and social burdens in the poorest countries. This Open Forum describes a planning framework to advance effective, sustainable design and implementation of mental health services in these settings. It builds on research in treatment dissemination and on the authors' experience in several initiatives-including the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa and the Partners In Health system in Haiti (Zanmi Lasante). The authors describe a "pyramid of care" approach that specifies five key skill packages to address common mental disorders in low-resource settings and five implementation rules: assess context first; identify priority care pathways and map them across skill packages; specify decision supports, supervision, and triage rules; use quality improvement practices; and plan for sustainability and capacity building. The framework addresses the need for a shared vocabulary and a set of tools to coordinate and compare efforts to scale-up mental health treatment across diverse settings.

Brain death and the historical understanding of bioethics.

In a 1968 Report, the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death promulgated influential criteria for the idea and practice known as "brain death." Before and since the Committee met, brain death has been a focal point of visions and nightmares of medical progress, purpose, and moral authority. Critics of the Committee felt it was deaf to apparently central moral considerations and focused on the self-serving purpose of expanding transplantation. Historical characterizations of the uses and meanings of brain death and the work of the Committee have tended to echo these themes, which means also generally repeating a widely held bioethical self-understanding of how the field appeared-that is, as a necessary antidote of moral expertise. This paper looks at the Committee and finds that historical depictions of it have been skewed by such a bioethical agenda. Entertaining different possibilities as to the motives and historical circumstances behind the Report it famously produced may point to not only different histories of the Committee, but also different perspectives on the historical legacy and role of bioethics as a discourse for addressing anxieties about medicine.

Moving beyond bioethics: history and the search for medical humanism.

From both within and without bioethics, growing criticism of the predominant methods and practices of the field can be heard. These critiques tend to lament an emphasis on logically derived rules and philosophical theories that inadequately capture how and why people have the moral attitudes they do, and they urge the use of more empirically grounded social sciences--history, sociology, and anthropology--to draw attention to the complex factors behind such attitudes. However, these critiques do not go far enough, as they do not question why debate over ethical categories should have such a central role in voicing concerns about medicine. The importance of using other forms of inquiry, especially that of history, to examine aspects of medical practice and the emergence of bioethics itself is not simply to refine bioethical moral analysis. Instead, history can be employed to counter the preoccupation with translating concerns about medicine into moral terms and to move towards what is more sorely needed: a true medical humanism.