As the university bids farewell to Provost Carl Amrhein, BMI is deeply grateful for the lasting legacy he leaves behind, having nurtured the institute from its inception under his capable leadership. We are very excited to welcome our new provost, Dr. Tania Bubela, and eagerly anticipate her leadership and input to to further advance the Institute and expand its global impact.
The Brain and Mind Institute (BMI) continues to ignite innovation, craft solutions, and nurture collaborations to widen the circle of hope to alleviate human suffering. Our journey involves unraveling the complexities of mental and brain health, dismantling stigma, and fostering healing through innovative community-based interventions.
During the first quarter of the year there have been a flurry of activities not only on the research front, but also in the educational platform, empowering communities with mental health awareness. We are thrilled to have developed and delivered our first Mental Health First Response training to leaders of houses of worship, in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. So far, we have trained over 150 leaders and aim to maintain this momentum throughout the year. This training has expanded our network of empathetic allies equipped to provide non-judgmental support, combat stigma and guide people to the right pathways of care. This training extends to a diverse audience, including priests, pastors, imams, and traditional healers from various faiths and denominations, who are often the first point of contact for community members combating mental ill health.
On the research front, we have made progress with our Living Lab Framework, by beginning the implementation trial in the Vishakani sub-county, in coastal Kenya. This is a significant step towards operationalizing our vision, and we look forward to rolling out this approach in both Kenya and Pakistan. The Living Lab is a community-centered, open innovation approach led by communities and interdisciplinary researchers. It aims to discover and prioritize community mental and brain health disorders in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) and co-create interventions for the identified disorders. We also aim to partner with policymakers and other key stakeholders to address mental and neurological challenges across the lifespan.
Additionally, BMI is promoting healthy sleep dynamics and their impact on mental well-being, through the UZIMA-DS Study, funded by the National Institute of Health. This is done through the use of wearable devices, such as the Fitbit. The minute-by-minute data is streamed wirelessly from these devises onto the ‘data cloud’ for analyses. We hope to be able to detect changes in the sleep and activity patterns to predict who is heading towards depression, for instance. Our studies are aimed at investigating mental ill health among healthcare workers, adolescents, and university students.
In a nutshell, we continue to expand the circle of hope, through 1) research aimed at developing culturally appropriate tools to detect mental- and brain-ill health, and 2) to develop new ways to treat these conditions at the community level; 3) civic education, aimed at demystifying mental illness and help build resilience and promotion of health-seeking behavior; and 4) build research coalitions to increase awareness and support policy development as a part of our collective response to human suffering in the geographies, especially in the global south.
