Lessons From Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Alleviating the Behavioral Health Workforce Shortage in the United States.

The United States is facing a mental health workforce shortage, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have historically grappled with even greater shortages. Therefore, LMICs have thought creatively about expanding the mental health workforce and the settings in which to deliver evidence-based and equitable mental health care. The authors introduce some mental health interventions in LMICs, describe evidence of the efficacy of these interventions gleaned from this context, and discuss the applicability of these interventions to the United States. The authors also reflect on the benefits and challenges of implementing these interventions in the U.S. mental health care system to alleviate its current workforce shortage.

Mutual Capacity Building to Reduce the Behavioral Health Treatment Gap Globally.

Use of lay health workers for the treatment of common mental disorders is an expanding, yet still underutilized, opportunity for closing the behavioral health treatment gap globally. In this commentary, we describe how "mutual capacity building," an equal exchange of ideas between low and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs) to promote shared learning, could promote the development and scale-up of therapies using lay health workers. We propose ways that task sharing models for behavioral health can inform and be supported by bidirectional learning across HICs and LMICs.