Julie Hannah is a Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Essex, Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy based at the Human Rights Centre, and co-founder of the Centre for Mental Health, Human Rights, and Social Justice, a global research consortium. Her research focuses on the intersections between medicalization, criminalization and human rights. She has a particular interest in international drug control policy, mental health, and the human rights aspects of the pursuit of social justice.

Lisa Cosgrove, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where she teaches courses on psychiatric diagnosis and psychopharmacology. She was a Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University (2010-2015), served as a consultant to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, child psychiatrist Dainius Puras (2017-2020), and is currently a Faculty Fellow at the Applied Ethics Center at UMB. Lisa and her students conduct research that broadly aims to shift the current biomedical paradigm and integrate a human rights approach in mental health policies and practices. Specifically, their research addresses 1) the ethical and medical-legal issues that arise in organized psychiatry because of academic-industry relationships and 2) the ways in which commercialized science reinforces epistemic injustice and undermines an appreciation for the moral and political context of physical and emotional suffering. Her recent publications have addressed the ethical issues that arise with the use of digital phenotyping and digital psychotropic drugs.

Dainius Pūras is a medical doctor and human rights advocate. He served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health from 2014 to 2020. He is also a professor at Vilnius University, Lithuania, and the director of the Human Rights Monitoring Institute, an NGO based in Vilnius.

I’m a qualitative sociologist with a track record of research and professional work on mental health policy. My work broadly concentrates on the exchanges between health and democracy, at the micro (service-user participation and community engagement) and macro-levels (health-related social movements, democratic transitions and health care policy, human rights and grassroots advocacy in health), specifically in South America. I have conducted research on the experiences of caregivers of persons with psychosocial disabilities and their interaction with care providers, the activist practices of mental health service-user and survivors, the political and administrative dimensions of community participation in healthcare policy, the socio-political contexts of psychiatric deinstitutionalization and the social and cultural aspects of early intervention in psychosis. In studying these topics, I have used ethnography, oral history, in-depth interviews, and documentary analysis. I am ethically and politically concerned with justice and equity in global health and with the relevance of culture, context and locality in healthcare research. Currently, I’m working on a sociologically-oriented oral history project centred on the transformation of a large psychiatric hospital in Santiago’s outskirts during and after dictatorship (1980-2010). The project reveals that deinstitutionalisation encompasses many subtle changes and tensions invisible to the metrics or progress used to describe health services transformation. In the case of Chile, these changes are shaped by a complex tension between the normative imperatives of “community mental health” and a neoliberal definition of State’s responsibilities that reinforced abandonment. I’m a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (https://wcceh.org), a researcher at the School of Nursing, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and an at the Millennium Institute for Research on Depression and Personality. I’m a founding member of the Platform for Social Research in Mental Health in Latin America (PLASMA), an Editorial Board Member of Critical Public Health, PLOS Global Public Health and part of Somatosphere’s editorial collaborative.

Alberto Vásquez Encalada is a Peruvian human rights lawyer and disability rights advocate. He graduated in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and holds an LL.M in International and Comparative Disability Law and Policy from the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the Co-Director at the Center for Inclusive Policy (CIP)). Previously, he worked as Research Coordinator at the Office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and as a consultant for different United Nations agencies. In Peru, he has been actively involved in drafting, advocating, and monitoring laws and policies concerning disability and mental health. He is the president of the Sociedad y Discapacidad – SODIS and a member of the Redesfera Latinoamericana de la Diversidad Psicosocial.

Ana Carolina Florence, PhD is the project manager of the NIMH-funded Early Psychosis Intervention Network (EPINET) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. Dr. Florence has supported the implementation of public community based mental health centers in the south of her home country Brazil and the deinstitutionalization of long-term residents of psychiatric hospitals. Her research focuses on public sector mental health services internationally, with specific interests in quality improvement in real-world, resource scarce public sector mental health settings, community engaged and participatory research methodologies and emerging and established serious mental illness, particularly psychosis/schizophrenia. In Brazil, as in most low- and middle-income countries, early intervention services for first episode psychosis are virtually inexistent, which led Dr. Florence to pursue her postdoctoral studies in the United States (Yale University) with an interest in advancing global equity in access and quality of mental health services, especially for youth experiencing psychosis. In the US, Dr. Florence worked on a state-wide learning collaborative to support a recovery-oriented system of mental health care in Connecticut. She also coordinated the development, planning and community engagement phases of the implementation of a novel mental health crisis initiative directly connected with the 911 system to reduce police involvement in psychiatric emergencies in the city of New Haven. Dr. Florence is fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French and her current work in EPINET focuses, among other things, on building a learning healthcare system through extensive stakeholder engagement within the state of New York’s first episode psychosis program OnTrackNY.

Akriti Mehta is a survivor researcher from India. Her experiences of mental distress and mental health services as well as the work of other users, survivors, and persons with psychosocial disabilities led her to critically examine what ‘madness’ means. She is currently doing her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science examining psychosocial disability activism in India and is also involved in several projects related to disability studies, madness, activism, and justice in the global South. Within the Centre, Akriti (along with Alberto Vasquez) is leading the Mad Thinking project. Currently, I’m working on a sociologically-oriented oral history project centred on the transformation of a large psychiatric hospital in Santiago’s outskirts during and after dictatorship (1980-2010). The project reveals that deinstitutionalisation encompasses many subtle changes and tensions invisible to the metrics or progress used to describe health services transformation. In the case of Chile, these changes are shaped by a complex tension between the normative imperatives of “community mental health” and a neoliberal definition of State’s responsibilities that reinforced abandonment.

China Mills, PhD, is the Head of Research at Healing Justice Ldn. She leads the Deaths by Welfare project https://healingjusticeldn.org/deaths-by-welfare-project/ at Healing Justice Ldn, co-created with people with lived experience of structural marginalisation, and researching welfare reform related deaths and disabled people’s flight for justice. China is the author of the book ‘Decolonizing Global Mental Health: the Psychiatrization of the Majority World’ (Routledge) and her research looks at how mental health is framed and contested as being global and at what happens when issues such as distress and suicide are framed as ‘global mental health’ issues. China is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Critical Social Policy, and has published widely on mental health, including on suicides linked to welfare reform and austerity; the development of global guidelines and the use of digital technology in global mental health; and the colonial histories and coloniality of global mental health.

Damon Barrett Jur. Dr. is the co-Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, which he co-founded in 2009. He is a lecturer at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg. His most recent book, Child Rights and Drug Control in International Law, was published by Brill/Martinus Nijhoff in 2020.

Faraaz Mahomed is a person with lived experience of a mental health challenge, and a clinical psychologist and mental health and human rights researcher from South Africa. He holds Visiting Research Fellow positions at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. He also works with UNICEF’s Health Section as Technical Adviser on Adolescent Mental Health, and with the Programmes Committee of CBM UK on their work related to inclusive mental health. Faraaz previously worked on subjects including rights-based mental health financing and policy-making in East and West Africa, the US and globally, and on the impact of COVID-19 on people with lived experience of mental health challenges, as a Senior Program Officer in the Public Health Program at the Open Society Foundations. In 2018, Faraaz supported the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health’s report on mental health of people on the move, and, in 2021, published; Mental Health, Human Rights and Legal Capacit; (Cambridge University Press), along with co-editors Michael Ashley Stein, Vikram Patel and Charlene Sunkel.

Lee Edson P. Yarcia is a lawyer and physician who advocates for human rights and public health. He currently serves as Drug Policy Expert of the United Nations Joint Programme for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in the Philippines, and teaches Constitutional Law and Medical Jurisprudence as Senior Lecturer at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law. Before this, he was Policy Legislative Consultant at the Philippine House of Representatives where he provided technical guidance in the development of health laws. He was also Research and Policy Officer at NoBox Philippines, a non-profit which advocates for harm reduction. He was a resource person during the drafting of the Mental Health Act, and teaches Mental Health as a core topic in his law school classes. Lee obtained his Juris Doctor Degree from the UP College of Law, and his Medical Degree from the UP College of Medicine. He received further executive education on public health leadership at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and research training at the University of California San Francisco.

Dr. Artin Mahdanian is a Persian-Canadian psychiatrist and existentialist trained at McGill University and Johns Hopkins University. He is certified by the Royal College of Physicians of Canada (FRCPC) and the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN), and is registered in Canada (QC, NU), the United States (DC, MD), and the United Kingdom (GMC). Dr. Artin’s academic journey began with a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree at Tehran University, followed by a Master of Science (MSc) in Psychiatry Research and a Psychiatry Residency at McGill University. As a visiting scholar, he has contributed to Global Mental Health initiatives at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and King’s College London, Maudsley Hospital. He completed his academic training with a clinical postdoctoral fellowship in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. His expertise extends beyond psychopharmacological treatments of psychiatric conditions. He has received training in various psychotherapy modalities, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Existential Therapy, and Jungian Analysis. In his practice, he integrates these approaches within an eclectic existential framework, offering Dynamic Eclectic Existential Psycho-pharmaco-therapy (DEEP) that draws on the most effective elements of each method. His clinical and research interests include mood, anxiety, and trauma-related conditions, existentialism, student mental health, and global mental health with a focus on human rights, the abuse of psychiatry, and recovery.