GMhAD is an open toolkit for global mental health assessment tools. Submissions for the database should aim to assess mental disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, PTSD) or locally recognized forms of distress (e.g., cultural concepts of distress, idioms of distress). The tools should be designed for use in low and/or middle income countries, the Global South, or among displaced populations (e.g., Cambodian refugees in the US). Submitted tools should be culturally and linguistically appropriate for their intended setting(s) and may be developed, adapted, and/or validated for use among one or a number of subgroups within a population.

Mental and substance use disorders are responsible for 20 percent of Years Lived with Disability worldwide (Whiteford et al. 2013) and cost the global economy $1 trillion annually (Chisolm et al. 2016).

Driven by the WHO mental health Gap Action Program (mhGAP), there has been a global expansion of interventions designed to respond to this remarkable burden of disease. However, these interventions typically rely on Western psychiatric assessments that have undergone simple translation, failing to use the significant number of existing tools that have been culturally adapted and locally validated for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This threatens the success of global mental health interventions, since experiences and expressions of mental illness are highly culturally specific. However, there is currently no central location where practitioners or researchers can go to locate adapted or validated mental health tools. We aim to create a central location where practitioners and researchers can go to locate adapted or validated mental health tools.

Society for Psychological Anthropology
Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture
World Association of Cultural Psychiatry
Foundation for Psychocultural Research