2020 Memorial Lecture for Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana – 3 December 2020
Attend the webinar here.
Global, regional and national response to COVID-19: protecting and promoting mental health
In this annual lecture, Dr Fahmy Hanna, who is leading the World Health Organization’s (WHO) mental health and psychosocial support response to the COVID-19 pandemic, will give a keynote lecture on the global response. We will then have presentations from Dr Mohammed Abdulaziz from the Africa CDC, Addis Ababa and Giselle Dass from the University of Colombo and COMGAP-S, Sri Lanka, on the response in their regions, followed by a panel discussion exploring the factors that have facilitated and hindered the promotion of mental health.
Presentations of COMGAP-S at the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture Annual Meeting 2020
Primary Investigator of COMGAP-S trial Dr. Shannon Doherty, in conjunction with her Sri Lankan colleague Giselle Dass from THEME Institute, Colombo, gave a talk introducing the trial at the 41st annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture, which was held online on 9-10 October 2020. You can watch the talk on YouTube here. Team member Gergana Manolova presented a poster at the same meeting describing the nested study of the process of adapting the mhGAP videos for use in Sri Lanka. Read the article about the study here.
Past Events
2019 Memorial Lecture for Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana
The Centre for Global Mental Health hosted the annual memorial lecture for Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana on 10 October 2019, World Mental Health Day. This year’s memorial lecture focused on the mental health of post-humanitarian crisis migrants, forced into displacement by armed conflict in Sri-Lanka and Syria, and natural disasters in Peru.
The lecture was preceded by two speed talks on scaling up trans-diagnostic mental health services in conflict-effected populations by Dr. Bayard Roberts, and the psychosocial effects of El Niño in the northern coast of Peru by Dr. Elaine Flores. The keynote presentation was delivered by Dr. Shannon Doherty on the COMGAP-S project. Dr. Doherty presented the general overview of the project, which was conceived by Dr. Siriwardhana and continued by her after his death. The second phase of the project, which contains the clinical trial, is still ongoing and is expected to finish in 2020. The project has been funded by the Centers for Disease Control in the US.
You can watch the recorded lecture here.
2018 Memorial Lecture for Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana
On 21 June 2018 the Centre for Global Mental Health hosted the second memorial lecture in honour of Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana in the small lecture theatre of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London.
Prof. Bayard Roberts, a collaborator of Dr. Siriwardhana, gave the lecture on research on mental health and psychosocial support in humanitarian settings, with more details on the progress, gaps and opportunities. This topic was featured a lot in Dr. Siriwardhana’s work on internal displacement and migration in Sri Lanka during the conflict which ended in 2009.
The Mental Health Innovation Network has recorded and uploaded a commemorative podcast for Dr. Siriwardhana – listen to it here.
2017 Memorial Lecture for Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana
The Centre for Global Mental Health hosted the first memorial lecture in honour of Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana on June 8th 2017 in the John Snow lecture theatre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The lecture was given by Dr. Barbara Lopes-Cardozo from the Center for Global Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US, on the topic of conflict, migration, mental health and research ethics in memory of the life and work of Dr. Siriwardhana.
Listen to the lecture here, courtesy of the Centre for Global Mental Health.
Migration Health: Advancing the unfinished agenda
A public lecture given by Dr. Davide Mosca, Director, Migration Health Department of the International Organization of Migration.
