The School of Social Work recently hosted the inaugural Beyond Borders: Global Mental Health Research and Services Conference. Coinciding with World Mental Health Day, the conference sought to bring together leaders, researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience from the local Champaign-Urbana community and around the world. Spanning two days, the event included speaker sessions on a range of topics—from the use of AI in mental health support to the role of dance in mental wellbeing—as well as a morning mindfulness walk, community connections hall, and an artists alley.
Dr. Flora Cohen, Assistant Professor and organizer of the conference, has always been interested in understanding how people from all over the world view their own mental health and healing. The conference was a continuation of her work, with a focus on transdisciplinary perspectives that can truly meet people where they are and collaborate to get them where they want to go.
The timing of the conference coinciding with World Mental Health Day was a purposeful decision. “World Mental Health Day raises awareness of mental health issues around the world and mobilizes efforts in support of mental health,” Dr. Cohen confirms. “We wanted to include arts and practice-based perspectives because we were interested in understanding how we can integrate art (music, painting, textiles, etc) into programs and research.”
As day one of the conference took off, Dr. Cohen was pleasantly surprised to find that the diverse conference participants had a transdisciplinary and holistic view of mental health. She recalls a focus on treating everything from symptoms to systems. Another prominent theme of the conference was “decolonizing mental health”, which Dr. Cohen describes as having four main factors:
- 1. Understanding that the way the formal mental healthcare system in the U.S. views mental health is not the same as how people from other countries or contexts view mental health.
- 2. Because the symptoms of mental health challenges differ, treatments must be informed by individual and community-level conceptualizations of health and healing. Strategies for healing can look different for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that one is necessarily better than the other.
- 3. There is a dearth of evidence about what works and what doesn’t work in the Global South, largely because the Global North determines what counts as evidence and who is able to evaluate programs.
- 4. We still have a long road ahead of us if we want to liberate evidence from the Global South, and integrate decolonized solutions to mental health care.
On the future of mental health, Dr. Cohen is hopeful. “I see a growing interest and momentum in global mental health,” she says. “While the global mental health sector has been met with some political challenges recently, these challenges have presented opportunities for innovation and investment in local solutions.”
On the topic of individual participation in strengthening local communities, she looks to the Global South. “The truth is that the Global South has been finding a way to support people who are struggling with their mental health for a long time, to varying degrees of success, and with limited funding. If we can learn collaboratively with them, then I believe we can continue to grow collectively.” In order to enhance collaborations with guests from different parts of the world, speakers from South Africa and Bangladesh were sponsored to attend the conference and present on their work with youth, families, tea workers, and students.
In a time when mental health challenges feel overwhelming for so many, she hopes that attendees remember that “we heal in communities, with tools that we pick up along the way. One of our participants said that she was able to find healing through a combination of medication, therapy, meditation, art, and religion. I think that is true for everyone—we have to find what works best for ourselves, and for our communities.”
The conference was made possible by the generous support of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Vision 2030 Global Strategy’s Implementation Grant. Other incredible sponsors included the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Social Work, National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Krannert Center, McKinley Foundation, Humanities Resource Institute, and the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity.
