‘Grand Challenges to Global Mental Health’: Critical perspectives on the US-NIMH initiative

In 2011 the US National Institute of Mental Health launched the Grand Challenges to Global Mental Health on the lines of earlier initiatives on ‘Global Health’ and on ‘Global Chronic Non-Common-communicable diseases’. The Initiative that drew support from a number of organizations assembled a large global expert panel that followed a three-step process of arriving at a list of the most critical challenges in mental health in the next decade. When the results of this Initiative were published in Nature a number of practitioners, academics and patient advocate groups questioned the narrow framework that grounded the initiative resulting in a distorted picture of the most relevant mental health challenges. This short letter raises some of these concerns for further elaboration and public debate.