Dr Tessa Roberts, Dr / PhD

Profile

I am a lecturer in the Unit for Social & Community Psychiatry, part of the Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health at the Wolfson Institute for Population Health. I was previously a member of the Centre for Society & Mental Health at King’s College London (Health Service and Population Research department, in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience), where I now hold an honorary position.

My background is in Global Mental Health, and I’ve been involved in several mixed methods epidemiological research programmes around the world on depression and psychosis, including INTREPID II (funded by the MRC), SCOPE (funded by the Wellcome Trust), and PRIME (funded by the UK Department for International Development), all of which focus on low-resource settings.

I have been actively involved in teaching on the MSc Global Mental Health at King’s, where I led the Society and Mental Health module, and have supervised both Master’s and PhD students on global mental health-related projects. I am currently completing a British Academy-funded fellowship about the links between neighbourhoods and mental health in Trinidad.

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests centre around the ways in which population mental health is affected by the social, political and economic conditions that shape our lives, and the local contexts in which people live. I’m particularly interested in the impact of interventions and policies that might not normally be considered to be mental health programmes (i.e. those that take place outside of health services) and how communities interact with such initiatives. I’m also interested in what we can learn about public mental health through cross-cultural comparisons and mutual learning between diverse settings. Areas of focus going forward include mental health inequalities, community-based participatory research, prevention and evaluation of upstream interventions, and developing new approaches to public mental health.

Publications

Outstanding publications 

Neighbourhoods & recovery from psychosis in Trinidad: A qualitative study. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667321523001579

Mutuality as a method: advancing a social paradigm for global mental health through mutual learning. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-023-02493-1

Urbanicity and rates of untreated psychotic disorders in three diverse settings in the Global South. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/urbanicity-and-rates-of-untreated-psychotic-disorders-in-three-diverse-settings-in-the-global-south/AB0AFAF4A6D633DD8BDE6D08D6F11883

Reconceptualising the treatment gap for common mental disorders: a fork in the road for global mental health? https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/reconceptualising-the-treatment-gap-for-common-mental-disorders-a-fork-in-the-road-for-global-mental-health/A786D71FEA2CFC5EA5D4AEAB0D079BCA

“Is there a medicine for these tensions?” Barriers to treatment-seeking for depressive symptoms in rural India: A qualitative study. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953619307361

Supervision

Lucy Owusu, NIHR, Economic evaluation of school based interventions in Ghana: methods, application and recommendations using the Youth in Mind programme