Cascade Impacts: Mental Health Workforce & Community Resilience

About the Webinar: 

Only a small fraction of the world’s population in need of mental health and crisis support has access to effective, affordable, high-quality mental health care. For depression alone, gaps in service coverage range from 77% of people in high-income countries with depression lacking minimally-adequate treatment, to 97% lacking minimally-adequate treatment in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Access that exists is inequitably distributed, and the growing demand for mental health support is outpacing the supply of mental health workforce through traditional pathways, exacerbating the critical shortage of mental health professionals in many countries.

In this growing global mental health crisis, it is imperative to identify dynamic digital mental health models to expand access to effective, high-quality mental health and crisis support, while simultaneously building the resilience of individuals, communities and populations. Emerging insights suggest that digital mental health and crisis response models that incorporate trained volunteers may do just that.

In this webinar, collaborative researchers from the affiliated network of text-based crisis response partners at Mental Health Innovations (providers of Shout, in the UK), Kids Help Phone (Canada), Text About it by Spunout (Ireland), and Crisis Text Line (United States) share insights from their collective efforts to illuminate the cascade impacts of volunteers through their models.