Learners without borders

We are launching the Teaching and Learning (T&L) section of Global Mental Health (GMH) in a spirit of celebration grounded in deep awareness of responsibility. In concert with the Journal’s mission of moving from making the case to implementing GMH (Belkin, 2014), the T&L section’s mandate is the public health need for effective and widely accessible mental health teaching and learning methods, tools, metrics, networks, and communities. We welcome your contributions so we can tackle what historically has been the greatest contributor to mental health treatment gaps: lack of an adequately (in numbers and capacity) trained mental health workforce (Scheffler & World Health Organization, 2011). This priority from the field is echoed in the research world: during a global Delphi workshop to identify mental health research priorities in lowand middle-income countries (LMICs), training of community health workers in evidence-based care was rated as a top priority (Collins et al., 2011). And the landmark Mental Health Action Plan by the World Health Assembly articulated as a key actionable target the development of knowledge and skills in mental health services grounded in scientific evidence, contextual understanding, and commitment to human rights (World Health Organization, 2013). With teaching and learning of the mental health workforce as its central axis, the T&L priority areas include: • Innovations in the development of feasible, contextually informed, effective, and cost-effective training (workshops, manuals, and supervision) with members of the mental healthcare workforce, both specialists and non-specialists. • Provider and supervisor skill competency assessment, life-long learning, and skill reinforcement programs, ongoing program quality monitoring and improvement procedures, provider burden reduction and burnout prevention, user-friendly clinical management and decision-support mand e-tools, organizational/policy factors supporting ongoing skill development, wellbeing of trainers and trainees, etc. • Increase of community engagement and advocacy, family and person involvement in treatment, community mental health literacy, stigma reduction strategies and community impact of interventions on mental health knowledge and attitudes, etc. • Effective strategies to maximize the reach of state-of-the-art mental health skills to academics, practitioners, and trainees globally; ethics in training; models for sustainable capacity-building and brain-drain prevention strategies; development of new models of learning communities, collaboratives, and global classrooms; managing learning stimulus ‘overload’ in the e-age, etc.