Claire Greene, PhD, MPH

M. Claire Greene, PhD MPH, is an epidemiologist and implementation scientist interested in identifying opportunities to improve population mental health through community- and systems-level interventions.

Why do you do this work?

When I started doing public health work, I wasn’t originally interested in mental health and wanted to work on infectious disease outbreaks. But when I spoke to people affected by disease outbreaks, often the stories you get are people’s psychosocial experiences and implications of living with an often stigmatized health condition. I was drawn to thinking about the mental health and psychosocial implications of health and what it means to be healthy in a society where we don’t value mental health at parity as other health conditions.

Can you think of a proudest moment you’ve had while working within global mental health?

The projects I am most proud of are ones that have led to true collaborations across communities and different partnerships—that’s what gives me the most joy. Over the last couple months, we’ve been wrapping up projects and have been having events to share back our findings with different stakeholder groups. In those events, we’ve had the chance to have participants in the research or community members who’ve been involved in some aspect of the research to share back their experiences, what they learned and what being a part of this meant to them. I enjoy seeing the research live beyond what we traditionally think of as the boundaries of research. For example, watching communities engaged in the research advocating for better mental health and psychosocial supports in front of government stakeholders or policymakers or other people they often don’t have direct access to through the vehicle of this research program is such an exciting and important outcome of this type of work.

Could you speak more on the advantages of collaborative and interdisciplinary work in this field?

Because mental health is so connected with everything, not only health but with every aspect of our lives,  it is essential to bring in interdisciplinary partnerships and really employ a collaborative

approach. A big advantage of ensuring community stakeholders are collaborators and decision-makers in that process is that it promotes the appropriateness of the work we do as well as the potential ownership and sustainability of mental health research. The other way to think about interdisciplinary work is thinking outside the realm of public health into other social sciences, economics, protection and legal and policy perspectives—things that sometimes we as public health professionals are not adequately equipped with, perhaps. What we’ve often found, though, is that there are a lot of silos and barriers to actually doing interdisciplinary work that relate to policies and the way funding is distributed. To make a difference in global mental health, it is essential to have these interdisciplinary partnerships but that there is still a lot of work we need to do.

How do you envision the future of Global Mental Health progressing as a field?

I think that we’ve seen mini-generations of global mental health work. We’re now at a place where we’ve made a lot of progress identifying effective, scalable interventions. We’re now figuring out how those things are implemented and adopted in practice. One big gap that I’m hopeful that the future of global mental health can address is that we’ve yet to see real examples of where the research evidence has been adopted at a systems level and made population-level mental health changes. We have effective tools for individuals but at the population level, I’d like to see more strategies that can address mental health on a much larger scale and scale up research evidence in ways that can promote well-being at a larger level. There is a dominance of more Western and biomedical models of mental health interventions. While there is evidence that these strategies are effective, we may be underutilizing and undervaluing local models and local knowledge as it relates to mental health. I think this is one reason that we may not have seen these research results translated and adopted into larger and more sustainable systems. I hope in the future we can value different forms of knowledge and reach more of an equilibrium as opposed to the dominance of what I see as Western adapted and transported interventions into other cultures.

What's something you're working on right now that you're excited about?

I’ve been increasingly adopting methodologies for community based participatory research and human centered design into my mental health research and I’m excited to see where that goes, because centering and giving the decision-making power to communities when thinking about mental health has exciting outcomes. We see community engagement, ownership and support for mental health and creative problem solving from people who know the context better than anyone else.

Milli Wijenaike-Bogle, an MPH Candidate in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, interviewed Dr. Greene for this Q&A.