Professor Crick Lund sits at a table in the corner of an office wearing a dark linen shirt and frameless glasses. Behind him, a whiteboard is covered in scrawled notes and a pinboard displays clippings from newspapers, team photos and a memorial scarf from a conference in Addis Ababa.
Credit:

Alice Mann

Licence: All Rights Reserved

Professor Crick Lund, co-leader of ALIVE, a pioneering mental health study in Nepal, South Africa and Colombia.

PodcastWhen Science Finds a Way

Episode 11: Should we give out cash to improve mental health?

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Alisha speaks to Professor Vikram Patel to explore how cash transfers could hold the key to coming up with a universally applicable and low-cost breakthrough in the treatment of mental health disorders.

Credit:

Alice Mann

Licence: All Rights Reserved

Professor Crick Lund, co-leader of ALIVE, a pioneering mental health study in Nepal, South Africa and Colombia.

Alisha Wainwright

Professor Vikram Patel

33-minute listen
33-minute listen

Listen to this episode 

Show notes

Poor mental health has always been associated with lower socio-economic status, but what if you turned the idea on its head and administered cash transfers as a mental health treatment in and of itself? The scientific research community has long grappled with the lack of major breakthroughs in the treatment of mental health disorders. So could cash transfers hold the key to coming up with a universally applicable and low-cost mental health intervention?

In this episode Alisha is in conversation with Professor Vikram Patel, a world leader in global mental health, who explains the challenges researchers have faced globally in the fight against poor mental health, and the potential of using cash transfers. They hear from an early beneficiary of Brazil’s Bolsa Familia cash transfer programme and meet the professor developing a pioneering new study with young people in Nepal, South Africa and Colombia. 

Meet the guest

  • Professor Vikram Patel

    Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School

    Vikram is Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School, where he co-leads the Mental Health for All lab and the Global Mental Health at Harvard initiative. He co-founded The Movement for Global Mental Health, The Centre for Global Mental Health (at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), The Mental Health Innovations Network and Sangath (an Indian NGO developing mental health interventions). In 2015 he was named in Time Magazine as one of the world’s most influential people.

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Alisha speaks to Professor Christian Happi about his pioneering use of genomic sequencing during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Nigeria, and how the technology could unlock the secrets of disease prevention.

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