Our public lecture series features talks from internationally acclaimed academics in the field of youth mental health. Each virtual talk lasts for an hour, including a Q&A session with the guest speaker. Join us as we welcome Professor Brandon Kohrt, who will be talking on building a skilled workforce for child and adolescent mental health in humanitarian settings. This lecture is supported by the Cardiff University Global Health Network.

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The global shortage of child and adolescent mental health specialists requires urgent action to expand the workforce, particularly in humanitarian emergencies and other contexts of adversity. Evidence now supports a range of interventions delivered safely and effectively by non-specialists, including WHO’s Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE), interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) for adolescents, trauma-focused CBT, and caregiver programs. Scaling these approaches demands reliable strategies to ensure the competence of non-specialists to do-no-harm and deliver interventions effectively.

The WHO-UNICEF Ensuring Quality in Psychosocial and Mental Health Care (EQUIP) platform was developed to address this gap by providing free, standardized tools for competency-based training and supervision. EQUIP is a free online platform with resources in more than 14 languages. EQUIP uniquely captures both helpful and potentially harmful behaviors, making it a valuable resource not only for strengthening safe and empathetic practice but also for advancing research on how competencies shape outcomes across diverse interventions. This talk will introduce participants to EQUIP’s applications for training, supervision, and evaluation, and explore how it can inform the next generation of child and family mental health research and practice.

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Brandon Kohrt, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist and anthropologist with 30 years of experience improving mental health services in countries affected by war, political violence, disasters, and other humanitarian crises. He holds the Charles and Sonia Akman Professorship in Global Psychiatry at George Washington University, where he is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Global Health, and Anthropology, and Director of the GW Center for Global Mental Health Equity. Dr. Kohrt leads the WHO/UNICEF EQUIP initiative, establishing competency frameworks for mental health providers, and serves as lead technical advisor to UNICEF’s MMAPP initiative, measuring adolescent depression and anxiety worldwide. His work also focuses on developing mental health assessment tools and reducing stigma in healthcare settings. He was scientific co-advisor to the NIH Fogarty Health Research in Humanitarian Emergencies initiative (2017–2022), and a commissioner for the Lancet–World Psychiatric Association Commission on Depression and the Lancet Commission on Ending Stigma and Discrimination in Mental Health. He co-edited Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives and received the 2025 Distinguished Leadership Award from the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.