Welcome to Grand Challenges from nature. Grand Challenges is our new roundtable series,

in which a panel of experts take on the biggest challenges facing society and ask what scientists, governments, charities, even you and I should be doing to try and solve them.

I'm Kerry Smith, and this episode is about mental health.

In many countries, psychiatrists is about mental health.

In many countries, psychiatrists are a very rare species.

In India, for example, in 2014, there was one psychiatrist for every 300,000 people.

Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist himself, knows that this is a real bottleneck. People with mental health problems are found in communities in every part of the world.

We have evidence-based interventions for a wide range of mental health problems.

But what we don't have, he says, is mental health professionals to deliver this care,

provide the therapy

or even prescribe the drugs. In South India, his team has been training regular members of the

community to deliver mental health treatments. They train them using online resources and videos.

So the main objective of this exercise is to see what are the times and the activities that make you feel

better and what are the times and activities that make you feel low.

This is a clip from a video explaining to trainee workers how to help a patient with depression

plan their day and find activities that make them feel better.

So shall we start now?

I would like to ask you how you started your day today. and find activities that make them feel better. So, Shadhi, start now? Yeah.

I would like to ask you how you started your day today.

Like when did you get up?

I got up morning at my usual time at 7.

These are simple methods, but they've been shown to be effective in controlled trials.

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