Personal Statement
Rahman is a clinical academic, spearheading the Institute’s programme in Global Mental Health, with multiple international projects in the areas of perinatal, infant, child, adolescent and adult mental health, largely in low- and middle-income countries.

He has pioneered task-shifting approaches for mental health (non-specialists delivering simplified but effective psychotherapies under supervision of specialists). His innovative intervention, the Thinking Healthy Programme, was the first psychological intervention to be adopted by the World Health Organization for global dissemination. In the last decade, Rahman has developed and evaluated similar interventions for mental health including early child development, developmental disorders, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. Rahman's current focus is on implementation research for the scale-up of these interventions. With colleagues in Pakistan he has pioneered the use of technology to assist training, supervision and delivery of psychological interventions through non-specialists. He has written extensively on strategies to integrate mental health into policy and public health. He is a WHO expert advisor on the development of regional policy for mental health in the Eastern Mediterranean region and member of WHO’s mental health Guidelines Development Group.

The Global Mental Health Research Group would be pleased to hear from PhD students in the following areas: Global Mental Health; Maternal and Child mental health in low- and middle-income countries; implementation research in the global mental health context.

Research Overview
Rahman’s work has contributed to producing high quality global health research that directly addresses the diverse health needs of the poorest people in Low and Middle Income Countries. Rahman’s group applies these global solutions to the UK’s context to address inequalities in mental health.

Improving access to interventions for common mental disorders globally
Common mental disorders (CMDs, depression and anxiety) are the leading cause of disease burden worldwide. 75% to 85% individuals with CMDs in LMICs do not receive treatment. Rahman’s research led to the development and evaluation of the Thinking Healthy Programme (THP) for perinatal depression and Problem Management Plus (PM+) for managing anxiety and depression in the humanitarian context. Both interventions are now established as first-line interventions for Common Mental Disorders in the global context. THP and PM+ have the distinction of being the world’s first fully manualized ‘talking therapies’ to be incorporated into the WHO’s flagship mental health Gap Action Programme Intervention Guide (mhGAP-IG). According to the WHO, the mhGAP has been implemented in over 90 countries and reaching over a billion of the world’s population. Rahman is an advisor to the WHO on implementation of these interventions globally. In Pakistan where he continues to conduct his primary research, the Thinking Healthy Programme was included in the 2019 President’s Plan to Promote Mental Health of Pakistanis, an ambitious initiative to scale-up THP to the entire country.

Preventing mental disorders in children and adolescents through schools
Sixty-five percent of adult mental health conditions have their onset in childhood and adolescence. Schools can play a key role in prevention of mental disorder. Rahman was commissioned by the WHO to develop a teacher-focussed intervention that could allow early detection and management of common mental health problems in children in the school setting. He has partnered the WHO to successfully evaluate and scale-up the intervention in four countries of the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Region through an NIMH-funded programme (SHINE). His group’s research demonstrated the effectiveness of the programme and informed a theory of change for regional scale-up. This has led to the dissemination of the programme in the region.

Reverse Innovation
‘Reverse innovation’, i.e., learning from innovations that are occurring in developing and/or emerging markets and considering how these innovations may be translated into the context of the UK health system, can play a role in reducing inequalities in health-care in populations with unmet mental health needs. Our group has delivered several successful projects using our global ideas, including, providing care to women of South Asian origins suffering from perinatal depression, adult refugees and asylum seekers with untreated depression and anxiety, and disadvantaged women with mental health problems in inner-city settings.