Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast.

My name is Samantha Lilly, a science writer and global mental health researcher here at MIA.

I'm so excited to share

with you our most recent spotlight interview with Dr. Ursula Reid. In this episode, we'll be

discussing anything and everything concerning rights-based approaches to mental health care.

That is, how can rights-based mental health care be made more efficacious? Can certain approaches

be replicated across cultures? And in what ways

do our perspectives in the global north misunderstand and misrepresent practices in the global

South, especially in Africa, and particularly in Ghana? Thank you so much for listening and please

enjoy. Ursula Reid is a research fellow and associate at King's College London. She holds a PhD

in anthropology from University College London based on an ethnography of family experiences of mental

illness and help seeking in Ghana. Currently, her work centers itself around both global

mental health inquiry and participatory research methods and ethnography. With a geographical focus in Ghana, she explores

the experiences of mental illness and social exclusion in the region. She has helped articulate the

efficacy of the mental health care interventions in the region, as well as identify areas for improvement

to better enact rights-based approaches to mental health care. She does this with the aid of those

she works with and with a critical eye turned toward what global mental health is and what it

can be. Some of her recently published work includes her paper titled, Exploring the Potential

of a Rights-Based Approach to Work and Social Inclusion for People with Lived Experience of Mental Illness

in Ghana,

which exemplifies how those of us in the global north and high-income countries overlook what rights-based approaches to mental health care may actually look like.

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