A/Prof Crick Lund (BA Hons, MA, MSocSci (Clin Psych), PhD) is the Director of the Centre for Public Mental Health and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at UCT. He played a leading role in developing the first post-apartheid norms for mental health services in South Africa in the 1990s, and subsequently worked for the World Health Organization for 5 years, where he was involved in developing the Mental Health Policy and Service Guidance package, and consulting to several low and middle income countries (LMICs) in the development of national mental health policies and plans. From 2005-2010 he coordinated the Mental Health and Poverty Project, a DFID funded research programme consortium that worked in Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia, as well as serving as Principal Investigator for the South African site. As one of the authors of the 2007 Lancet “Call for Action” paper he was involved in modelling the resources required to scale up a core package of care in LMICs. He has also led the first systematic review of poverty and common mental disorders in LMICs, and has led the 2011 Lancet Global Mental Health paper on breaking the cycle of poverty and mental ill-health in LMICs.

He is currently CEO of PRIME (PRogramme for Improving Mental health carE), a DFID-funded research programme consortium evaluating the integration of mental health into primary health care in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, South Africa and Uganda. He is a Co-Investigator in the NIH funded IMHERZ (Improving Mental Health Education and Research in Zimbabwe) programme, which aims to build capacity for mental health education and research at the University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences. He provides teaching in public mental health for psychiatry registrars and clinical psychology trainees in the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health. His research interests include mental health policy, services and poverty.

Leslie Swartz

Leslie Swartz is a cofounder of the CPMH and is an experienced trainer and researcher in the fields of mental health and disability studies in Africa.  He has extensive experience in the area of international mental health, with a specific focus on Africa and low-income countries, and is well known for this work internationally. 

His 1998 book Culture and Mental Health: a Southern African View (Oxford University Press) is regarded as a standard in the field, and sets the agenda for leadership in mental health from African countries.  His co-authored Counselling and Coping (Oxford University Press, 2002) places mental health issues in public health context and is used in the training of both professionals (medical doctors, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech and hearing pathologists, public health practitioners, and nurses) and paraprofessionals in the mental health field.  He regards the mental health field as essentially interdisciplinary, and his co-edited volume Transformation through Occupation (Whurr/Wiley, 2004) has been hailed as a breakthrough for population-based thinking and practice in occupational science and occupational therapy, and has crossed over into related disciplines and especially disability studies.

He conducted the first known two-stage epidemiological study of mental disorder in South Africa, and is one of only two African researchers who contributed to the mapping of mental health research in low- and middle-income countries for the Global Forum for Health Research (in association with the World Health Organization). 

His research team has received awards for innovative training of health professionals in South Africa, and he is currently Lead Research Partner for the Southern African Federation on Disability Research Programme.  Amongst other duties in this project, he trains disabled researchers from ten African countries in research skills. 

He has consulted to international governments on their mental health programmes, and is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at international conferences on mental health.  He has contributed to the World Health Organization seminal volume on mental health promotion in international context, and has written guest editorials for journals such as the British Medical Journal, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and Synergy (a transcultural mental health journal).

He is an active publisher, and has over 180 publications.  He takes seriously the importance of high quality publications by African authors. 

Mark Tomlinson

Mark Tomlinson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.  He has completed epidemiological work investigating the association between postpartum depression and the mother-infant relationship, and the impact of postpartum depression on infant and child development.  He has also completed a randomised controlled trial to improve the quality of the mother-infant relationship and infant attachment in a peri-urban settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa.  He is currently involved in a community based trial aimed at preventing mother to child transmission of HIV and reducing neonatal deaths; and another aimed at reducing alcohol use, reducing HIV/TB and improving the nutritional status of women in the antenatal and postnatal period. He has a particular interest in infant and child development in conditions of high social adversity, as well as developing community based prevention programmes.  Recently, he has begun to focus on the health system challenges of scaling up services for infants and children.  He has published in the Lancet, Child Development, British Journal of Psychiatry, PLoS Medicine and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

Sharon Kleintjes

Sharon Kleintjes has an MA (Clinical Psychology) and MPhil (Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) at the University of Cape Town. She is in the process of completing a doctoral degree in the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, focusing on the scope and options for effective mental health care user participation in mental health related policy development and implementation in the South African context.  She has worked as a psychologist in public mental health service settings, in public mental health policy and programme development, and as a researcher in the area of public mental health policy and service development. 

She currently convenes a Diploma in Addictions Care within the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town. She has research interests in public mental health policy and service development, service user empowerment and gender based- issues in health.

Ashraf Kagee

Ashraf Kagee is Professor of Psychology at Stellenbosch University where he teaches courses in research methods and cognitive behavioural psychotherapy. He holds degrees in psychology, public health and programme evaluation and as such his work reflects a commitment to bringing a public health perspective to psychology.  His co-authored book Social Research Methods: an African Perspective is targeted specifically at researchers-in-training in the African context.  

Prof Kagee has published numerous scholarly articles using a variety of statistical approaches and methods, as well as qualitative approaches.  With his interest in health psychology, he has devoted much of his recent work to studying mental health among persons living with HIV, as well as the barriers to medication adherence among those receiving antiretroviral treatment. Much of his work concerns the debate around evidence-based practice in the context of mental health care in South Africa. His seminal article entitled Where is the Evidence in South African Clinical Psychology?, published in the South African Journal of Psychology, calls for greater consideration for empirically supported treatments tailored to specific psychological disorders. 

Prof. Kagee serves on a sub-committee of the World Health Organisation Advisory Group for the Revision of ICD-10 Mental and Behavioural Disorders focused on stress-related disorders. He currently chairs the Scientific Committee for Health Psychology of the International Congress of Psychology to be held in Cape Town in 2012. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Trauma Center for Survivors of Political Violence and a founder member of the Community Healing Network.