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One in every eight people live with a mental health disorder, so if that’s not you, it’s likely to be a close friend or family member. Despite there being a variety of known treatments, globally the majority of people suffering do not receive any medical support. To see how the discussion around mental health is playing out across the African continent, CrowdScience visits Nairobi, Kenya. Presenter Marnie Chesterton is joined by a live audience and panel of experts – psychiatrist David Ndetei, psychotherapist Reson Sindiyo and mental health journalist Dannish Odongo – to get to the heart of what’s going on in our heads. They discuss issues from taboo and superstition around mental health, to the treatment methods being used in Kenya that the rest of the world should know about. For more information, click on the link below to follow the live discussion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct3j7j

This is our core priority. We seek to take mental health to the level of the individual and the family

This is our core priority. We seek to take mental health to the level of the individual and the family; to their homes or to the nearest point of care such as the community dispensary, health centre or outreach point. We take a cross-sectional, multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach that seeks to identify and engage with all community stakeholders and all community physical and human resources who have contact with people with mental disorders. This involves both formal and informal sector administrators, opinion leaders and policy makers as well as the integration of different disciplines such as psychiatry, counselling, clinical psychology, nursing, human rights, health economics, anthropology, social science among many more. We align our approach on the MhGAP Intervention Guide and the WHO Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2014.