Global Mental Health: Rights, Care and the Global Landscape

Global Mental Health: Rights, Care and the Global Landscape

In this episode, Xand and Rochelle discuss the intricate relationship between geography and global mental health. Alongside guests Parth Sharma and Dr Kelly Rose-Clarke, they explore how factors such as conflict, climate, and social inequalities shape mental health experiences around the world, challenging conventional narratives and highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of mental health support.

This episode raises critical questions about the future of mental health care, the necessity for systemic change, and the role of lived experience in shaping effective interventions. As the conversation unfolds, we invite you to reflect on how global mental health can be disrupted and transformed for the better.

Guests:

Parth Sharma is an abolitionist, anti-colonial scholar whose work is grounded in their intersectional lived experience as a queer, non-binary, disabled, mad person. A cultural worker, filmmaker, and multimedia artist, Parth has worked in journalism, clinical mental health and human rights. Today, Parth is the Deputy Principal Coordinator for the Movement for Global Mental Health, and you can find them disrupting global mental health, interrogating the mental health industrial complex, and actively imagining abolitionist futures.

Dr Kelly Rose-Clarke is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Principal Research Fellow in Global Mental Health here at UCL. Kelly is interested in developing and testing mental health interventions for low-resource settings, with a focus on community-based approaches for children and adolescents. In Nepal, Kelly is leading an 8-year programme to evaluate a school-based talking therapy for adolescents with depression. She has worked as a consultant for UNESCO and conducted research for the World Health Organization to inform global mental health policy and programming.

In this episode:

• The impact of geography and socio-political factors on mental health
• How community-led initiatives can mobilise care during crises
• The intersection of rights and mental health care
• The potential for an abolitionist approach to global mental health
• What global mental health could look like in the coming decades

Hosts:

Xand van Tulleken – Doctor, Writer, and TV Presenter and Professor Rochelle Burgess – Community Health Psychologist and Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Health.

Resources and mentions:

Discover the new Global Mental Health MSc at UCL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/graduate/taught-degrees/global-mental-health-msc
Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation Nepal: https://www.tponepal.org/

“What has disrupted your thinking?”

Parth: Book - The Revolution Will Not Be Funded by INCITE! and Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton

Kelly: Art - landscapes of East Yorkshire by David Hockney

Production Credits:
Public Health Disrupted with Rochelle Burgess and Xand van Tulleken is a podcast from UCL Health of the Public. Recorded remotely and edited by Annabelle Buckland at Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative

Want to be part of a live recording of Public Health Disrupted?
On 30 June 2026, the podcast will be recorded in front of a live audience for the first time at UCL's Bloomsbury Studio. Learn more and get your ticket: https://bloomsburytheatre.com/event/2026/06/public-health-disrupted