As part of UCL200 celebrations, Global Mental Health Day @ UCL brought together researchers, clinicians, early career academics and students to discuss both the achievements of the past and the future aspirations of global mental health research and practice.

The event was organised by Professor Rochelle Burgess from UCL’s Institute for Global Health, and speakers were drawn from across five UCL faculties.

The event opened with a grounding introduction from Professor, who set the stakes clearly: just 3% of total government spending worldwide is allocated to mental health with a range from less than 1% in low-income countries to around 5% in high-income ones. The “treatment gap,” she explained, refers to the gulf between those who need mental health services and those who can actually access them, and it is widest precisely where it is most needed. For Burgess, global mental health is not simply a clinical discipline but rather it is an orientation toward inequality and justice, one that takes seriously lived experience, local context and the systematic structures that worsen outcomes for the most marginalised.

A look at global mental health at UCL

Professor Helen Killaspy opened the session by reflecting on her work developing cross-national standards for mental health care. Through a European Commission-funded project (DEMoBinc), she worked with patients with long-term and complex mental health needs across ten countries at varying stages of deinstitutionalisation, including the UK, Italy, Portugal and Bulgaria. Using a Delphi process involving around 400 participants, the work produced the Quality Indicator for Rehabilitation Care, now available in eleven languages and used by two-thirds of NHS inpatient mental health rehabilitation services in the UK. It has since helped shape the NICE guideline calling for specialist services for people with long-term mental health conditions, a guideline now referenced by multiple countries internationally.

Professor David Osrin then shared his community-based work in Mumbai, India, focusing on mental health support for survivors of domestic violence. The SNEHA TARA trial, run in partnership with the organisation SNEHA, demonstrated that mental health support is a meaningful component of case work for survivors. Osrin’s team also developed the Garima tool, designed to support the mental wellbeing of women experiencing domestic violence, as well as survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking. Having lived in Mumbai for 18 years before starting my undergraduate studies in London, I have seen the scale of domestic violence firsthand and appreciate how accurately Garima addresses the realities faced by women in these communities.

The subsequent Q&A surfaced a valuable methodological challenge: how do you measure mental wellbeing across cultural contexts? Standardised tools like the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) may not always translate meaningfully when people do not identify with the concepts being asked about, even when questions are posed in their own language. Rochelle Burgess offered a compelling illustration from her work in Nigeria, where women’s mental health was found to improve when they had a healthy child to care for. This was not because of the child per se, but because caring for the child gave them a rare space in which to exercise. Local frameworks, the panel agreed, are not optional extras but essential.

The future of global mental health: ECR visions of challenges and opportunities

Chaired by Dr Kelly Rose-Clarke, this session brought forward some of the most urgent and underexplored questions in the field.

Dr Lu Gram (presented his Wellcome-funded research on LGBTQ+ collective action as a prevention framework for depression and anxiety in urban Vietnam. LGBTQ+ people face two to three times the global average risk of depression, anxiety and suicide while also being frequently discriminated against by the very mental health services they might seek help from. In much of the Global South, the evidence base is thin, and support structures like family, religious institutions and social networks too often exclude queer individuals. Gram’s work in Vietnam, where same-sex relations have occupied a legally ambiguous space since 2014, explores how collective action and community-built structures can fill these gaps, and what that means for mental health outcomes.

Jeevan Toor spoke about young people in Arctic communities facing compounding barriers to mental health support which include failures within education systems, healthcare providers and child welfare services, alongside the long-term psychological legacy of colonisation. Many young people expressed a desire for greater cultural understanding in the care they receive, while some had been so disconnected from their heritage that they no longer spoke their own language.

Katie Atmore shared qualitative research conducted in Nepal, examining the tension between children’s digital and material realities. Young people from lower-income backgrounds with access to smartphones are routinely exposed to aspirational lifestyles online,  a dissonance that raises important questions about digital inequality and its effects on mental wellbeing. Her use of narrative and scenario-based methods offered a thoughtful approach to researching sensitive experiences with young participants.

Hope in times of crisis

Professor Ilan Kelman brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the question of community wellbeing in the face of climate and environmental change. His work spans art-science collaboration, including work with a 3D illustrator on coastal landscapes in England, as well as theatre, singing and even a magic show, designed to translate complex ideas across different ages and communities. A particular thread of his talk concerned language and perception: climate, he noted, is technically a social construction which is measured using the average of thirty years of weather data, and some languages do not even have a word for it! Communicating climate realities to communities requires meeting them in their own frameworks, not ours.

Policy, impact and the state of the world

Professor Lorraine Sherr closed the day with a direct assessment of where global mental health stands. Her advice of ‘sit tight and ride’ was not defeatist, but a recognition that the field has weathered enormous disruptions and must continue to do so. Resources remain the central challenge. Her research on cash-plus-care interventions, combining small cash payments with psychological support, points toward scalable models that could reach more people more affordably. She also drew attention to the staggering mental health consequences of COVID-19 orphanhood: the pandemic produced an estimated five million orphans in just two years, a largely invisible crisis with profound long-term implications for child mental health globally.

The day was, as expected, both a celebration and a reckoning. It honoured the real progress made in global mental health research while refusing to look away from the scale of what remains to be done. As UCL marks two hundred years, events like this serve as a reminder that a truly global university carries a global responsibility.

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