Abstract
The South Asian Hub for Advocacy, Research and Education (SHARE) was a five-year National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded program that aimed to stimulate the research base for task-shifting mental health interventions to address the mental health treatment gap in low and middle-income countries. During its 5 years (2011-2016) SHARE made notable accomplishments, including providing 20 studentships for short courses and ten fellowships to conduct mentored study, developing a new humanitarian research training course, implementing distance learning courses, creating an online repository of training materials, creation of a network of public health researchers at different career stages in South Asia, strengthening of partnerships amongst institutions of SHARE network and supporting its member's to produce peer reviewed publications. Furthermore, additional research capacity building and research grants leveraged on SHARE network were secured. The salient lessons learned in the 5-year program were that research capacity-building opportunities need to be tailored to the local context, as SHARE sought to develop and support courses that can build the capacities in specific areas identified as weak in the South Asian region. Mentoring was recognized as a critical component for which innovative and effective models of mentoring in the region need to be developed. Diverse platforms and mediums ought to be utilized to deliver the research training programs. Finally, research capacity-building program requires collaborative efforts of multiple stakeholders working locally, nationally and globally to attain the maximum impact in a region.
Highlights
Mental health disorders are highly prevalent, with 14% of the global burden of disease attributed to neuropsychiatric disorders (Prince et al 2007)
low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the Mental Health Research Mapping Project was initiated by the Global Forum for Health Research and the World Health Organization in 2005 with the goal of describing the current research capacity, resources, and agendas in LMICs
At the end of this 5-year program, SHARE has effectively managed to roll out 5 capacity-building programs (Table 1), all aiming at orientating the early and middle career researchers to mental health research and equipping them with the necessary skill set needed to carry out scientific research
Summary
Mental health disorders are highly prevalent, with 14% of the global burden of disease attributed to neuropsychiatric disorders (Prince et al 2007). The overall goal of the SHARE research capacitybuilding component was to strengthen the capacity of partner institutions and researchers associated with these institutes, to generate, communicate and utilize mental health research with the goal of reducing the treatment gap for mental disorders in the region By implementing these core activities, by building a network of diverse institutions, and by involving the participation of policy makers, SHARE aimed to implement a coherent program to reduce the massive treatment gap in the region. Keeping this principle in mind all the researchers and fellows associated with SHARE were encouraged and guided to conduct their research by adapting the universally applicable research tools and methodologies to the local context Another important aspect taken into consideration was the inequitable distribution of training opportunities and resources to conduct research across the South Asian region. Online mentoring program involved formation of an online community of researchers (both junior and senior) to facilitate exchange of ideas, networking and career guidance for junior researchers by the experts in the group
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