Dr. Joshua Gordon visits TPO Nepal and Chitwan

Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the lead federal agency of USA for research on mental disorders, visited TPO Nepal central office on 30 November 2018. Mr. Suraj Koirala, Executive Manager of TPO Nepal, welcomed Dr. Gordon and gave a brief presentation on TPO Nepal’s work and achievements. Dr. Gordon was pleased with the work of TPO Nepal and remarked that it is contributing in the field of mental health not only in Nepal, but globally, by sharing through research articles how things are done.

Dr. Gordon also visited TPO Nepal’s project implementation site Chitwan on 29 November 2018, where TPO has been working for the last 7 years in the integration of mental health services into the primary healthcare system, stigma reduction, maternal mental health as well as research projects (OPAL and RESHAPE) funded by NIMH. TPO team along with Dr. Gordon visited PRIME project’s scale-up area; Piple Health Post. Dr. Gordon tweeted after the visit, “clinics like this one are successfully treating depression, schizophrenia, alcohol use disorder and more with evidence-based pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, delivered by trained lay workers.”

In the afternoon, the team visited an adolescent mother in Gitanagar participating in the StandStrong project, which seeks to test the feasibility and acceptability of mobile phone based technologies in identifying adolescent mothers in risk of depression and provide personalized psychological intervention. Dr. Gordon expressed his excitement that these technologies could be instrumental in helping the women with mental health problems.