Structural barriers perpetuate mental health disparities for minoritized US populations; global mental health (GMH) takes an interdisciplinary approach to increasing mental health care access and relevance. Mutual capacity building partnerships between low and middle-income countries and high-income countries are beginning to use GMH strategies to address disparities across contexts. We highlight these partnerships and shared GMH strategies through a case series of said partnerships between Kenya-North Carolina, South Africa-Maryland, and Mozambique-New York. We analyzed case materials and narrative descriptions using document review. Shared strategies across cases included: qualitative formative work and partnership-building; selecting and adapting evidence-based interventions; prioritizing accessible, feasible delivery; task-sharing; tailoring training and supervision; and mixed-method, hybrid designs. Bidirectional learning between partners improved the use of strategies in both settings. Integrating GMH strategies into clinical science-and facilitating learning across settings-can improve efforts to expand care in ways that consider culture, context, and systems in low-resource settings.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs for care of persons with mental illness remained largely unmet worldwide, testifying to the inadequacy of current approaches to mental health care and their unsuitability for the rising demand. One hurdle to improved access to quality care is the reliance on expensive specialist providers, particularly for the delivery of psychosocial interventions. This article describes EMPOWER, a not-for-profit program that builds on the clinical science demonstrating the effectiveness of brief psychosocial interventions for a range of psychiatric conditions; implementation science demonstrating the effectiveness of delivery of these interventions by non-specialist providers (NSPs); and pedagogical science demonstrating the effectiveness of digital approaches for training and quality assurance. The EMPOWER program leverages digital tools for training and supervising NSPs, designing competency-based curricula, assessing treatment-specific competencies, implementing measurement-based peer supervision for support and quality assurance, and evaluating impacts to enhance the effectiveness of the delivery system.

Introduction: African American women encounter disproportionately high rates of HIV-related morbidity and mortality, which is partially mediated through stigma and its effect on HIV treatment adherence.

Objective: To assess the effect of the UNITY peer support workshop on HIV-related stigma among African American women living with HIV, compared with a time and attention control group.

Methods: African American women living with HIV were randomized to the UNITY workshop or a breast cancer education control group. Interventions took place in HIV clinics in Chicago, IL and Birmingham, AL. Participants self-reported HIV-related stigma and social support at baseline, after workshop, and at 4 follow-up visits over 12 months.

Results: Two hundred thirty-nine participants (UNITY n = 124; breast cancer education n = 115) were assessed over 1 year. Both arms experienced decreases in mean stigma scores over time. Our model estimated that allocation to UNITY was not associated with a significant difference in stigma points over time. Post hoc analysis suggested that preceding increases in perceived social support are associated with decreased HIV-related stigma in this population.

Conclusions: Although UNITY did not significantly reduce HIV-related stigma in this population, our findings suggest that social support may be key to HIV-related stigma reduction.