Michelle Funk - WHO and the Sea Change in Mental Health
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2021
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Michelle Funk is the Unit Head of the Policy, Law, and Human Rights at the Department of Mental Health and Substance Use at the World Health Organization. She has created and leads the WHO Quality Rights Initiative that aims to assess and improve human rights standards in existing services and advance the full implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
In this interview, we discuss the launch of the new "Guidance on Community Mental Health Services: Promoting Person-Centred and Rights-Based Approaches." The document is grounded on the principles of recovery and rights-based approaches. It presents successful examples of best practices in mental health service provision respecting dignity, moving to zero coercion, and eliminating neglect and abuse. Among the best practices showcased in the document are Open Dialogue as practiced in Tornio, Finland, Soteria Berne in Switzerland, Afiya House in Western Massachusetts, Basal Exposure Therapy in Norway, and Hearing Voices Support Groups.
The Guidance builds on the momentum created by the critical voice of Dainius Pūras, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health. Puras criticized the dominance of the biomedical model in the Mental Health field and highlighted the harms associated with ignoring the social determinants of health that impact a person's mental health, such as violence, poverty, lack of proper nutrition, housing instability, lack of universal health coverage, discrimination and others.
In our conversation, Michelle Funk described the process of engaging stakeholders and persons with lived experience throughout the design and development of the document, the challenges of ensuring geographical representation given the global inequalities, and the hopes for the future.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.5 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Anna Florence, postdoctoral associate at the Yale |
| 0:19.5 | Program for Recovery and Community Health, |
| 0:21.8 | and a science writer for Mad in America. Today, I'm very excited to sit down with Dr. Michelle Funk |
| 0:28.4 | for an interview about her life, her career, and her role as unit had policy, law, and human |
| 0:34.8 | rights at the Department of Mental Health and Substance Use at the WHO. |
| 0:40.0 | Michelle obtained her PhD in public health at the University of Sydney and has worked in different |
| 0:45.8 | capacities at the WHO since 2000. Michelle has created and leads the WHO Quality Rights Initiative, which works with country to transform |
| 0:56.8 | their mental health services, to ensure quality and promote human rights, build the capacity |
| 1:02.7 | of all relevant stakeholders to understand and promote the human rights of people with |
| 1:08.0 | psychosocial, cognitive, and intellectual disabilities. To assess and improve quality and human rights of people with psychosocial, cognitive, and intellectual disabilities, to assess |
| 1:12.5 | and improve quality and human rights standards of existing services and supports, empower and |
| 1:18.2 | strengthen civil society movements to advocate for rights-based approaches in mental health |
| 1:22.9 | and related areas, and promote sustainable change through policy and law reform, which uphold |
| 1:29.8 | international human rights standards. In particular, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons |
| 1:35.7 | with Disabilities. Today, we'll talk about the guidance on rights-based community mental |
| 1:41.2 | health services that was launched on June 10th, 2021. |
| 1:46.2 | Welcome, Michelle. |
| 1:47.6 | I wanted to start by talking a little bit about your career. |
| 1:51.1 | How did you decide to work in public health and global health? |
| 1:54.1 | Well, first of all, thanks, Anna, for inviting me to this podcast. |
| 1:59.8 | My education throughout university was in psychology and public health. |
... |
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