Getting to know PLOS Mental Health: Socio-economics & Political Approaches

In the latest blog from our ‘Getting to know PLOS Mental Health‘ series, we speak with Dr Soumitra Pathare, who co-leads our ‘Socio-economics and Political Approaches’ section alongside Dr China Mills. Dr Pathare shares his interests, which are largely focused on reforming mental health systems so that they are rights based. He also shares his hopes for PLOS Mental Health – particularly in the socio-economics landscape.

Please tell us about yourself

[SP] I am a psychiatrist trained in India and UK. I helped co-found the Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy at the Indian Law Society in 2007. The Centre’s mission is to strengthen and transform the mental health of our communities to be holistic and responsive in addressing individual and collective well-being. We work nationally & internationally, with a specific focus on vulnerable & marginalised populations across low- and middle-income settings. We work on three specific areas – policy change, implementation research and capacity building for professionals and community stakeholders.

What are your main areas of interest?

[SP] I am interested in reforming our mental health systems to be rights based. Hence I have been interested in the area of mental health policy and law. I am also interested in scaling up frugal and innovative community based programs in low resource settings and therefore in implementation research. 

Why did you agree to join PLOS Mental Health as a Section Editor?

[SP] The short answer is because Rochelle (PLOS Mental Health co-EiC) is a collaborator and someone I admire deeply, and she asked me – I couldn’t say no to her 😊 

On a more serious note, I think journals need to change their emphasis from the Global North as the knowledge giver and the Global South as the knowledge receiver. There are many very bright people working in the Global South (and I don’t mean people of Global South origin at Global North universities parachuting to do research in the Global South, but academics living and working in the Global South) who have designed and evaluated interesting frugal innovations which are community based and can benefit the Global North too. I admire their work because they have to overcome so many hurdles, not least the lack of resources for research and knowledge production as well as other structural challenges that exist in Global South. I hope we are able to provide them a platform to showcase their work and to make global mental health truly global – by which I mean provide opportunities for global south leadership in mental health research. 

I think journals need to change their emphasis from the Global North as the knowledge giver and the Global South as the knowledge receiver.

What kind of submissions would you like to see in the Psychiatry section/what do you think are the most pressing questions of your field at the moment?

[SP] While everyone talks about shifting away from a bio-medical model of mental health, this is more lip service than reality. One of the reasons is because mental health is still seen as a predominantly health issue. So while we talk about social determinants of mental health we haven’t really shifted the needle on policy makers and the general public’s conceptualization of mental health. This is probably because we have failed to create alternative models of understanding mental health which puts social inequities at the center of understanding as well as addressing mental health issues. 

So I would like to see more papers which address this issue, especially from the global south. We should also promote more editorials, conceptual papers and the like. Research is not just about data driven publications, there is a need for theory building which seems to be neglected at the moment. 

…while we talk about social determinants of mental health we haven’t really shifted the needle on policy makers and the general public’s conceptualization of mental health

You can take a look at all of our publications here. Some of our ‘Socio-Economics & Political Approaches’ content includes:

• The role of social determinants of health in mental health: An examination of the moderating effects of race, ethnicity, and gender on depression through the all of us research program dataset

• Navigating (gendered) social worlds: A qualitative exploration of Canadian young people’s social relationships and mental health

• Experiences of mental health and poverty in high-income countries during COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-aggregation

• Fleeing the war: a socio-ecological perspective on the mental health of internally displaced and refugee children and adolescents living in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq