
Photo by Chloe Capture via Flickr.
While organizing the “Building a mental health workforce from the grassroots up” panel for Health Journalism 2022 in Austin, I searched for weeks for a community health worker certified in mental health to join the discussion. That type of frontline worker seems critical to any parsing of how to fill critical gaps in a U.S. mental health matrix that the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association describe as persistently short of clinical social workers, psychiatric nurse practitioners, psychologists and psychiatrists.
I’ve recently observed more advertisements or announcements regarding community mental health workers. City of College of San Francisco, for example, is offering a certification in mental health for community health workers, which, as a general group, has a more than 60-year-history in the United States. And the National Council for Mental Wellbeing trains community mental health workers largely through organizations requesting that training of their own laity.
During AHCJ’s Mental Health Summit last fall, India-born Vikram Patel, Ph.D. M.B.B.S, a professor in Harvard Medical School’s department of social medicine and global health, noted that in parts of Africa, South Asia and other exceedingly less-resourced nations, grandmothers, for example, are trained to help neighbors suffering from, say, post-partum depression navigate that terrain.