Arlene MacDougall
Arlene MacDougall is a psychiatrist and an assistant professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University. She is the director of Global MINDS @ Western, an Interdisciplinary Development Initiative (IDI) focused on the development of knowledge, skills, and support for students and faculty to tackle one of the world’s most pressing and wicked problems: the global burden of mental disorders. At Global MINDS, transdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder approaches are utilized to catalyze the development, implementation, evaluation, and mobilization of disruptive and sustainable solutions that reduce the burden of mental disorders and related issues in low-resource settings such as East Africa and marginalized communities within Canada. MacDougall is currently leading a multi-institutional collaboration based in Kenya involving the Africa Mental Health Foundation and several Canadian university partners known as Community REcovery Achieved Through Entrepreneurism (CREATE). CREATE is a promising new paradigm for promoting and supporting recovery from serious mental illness in low-income settings that involves the development of a work-integrated social enterprise coupled with a low-cost Psychosocial Rehabilitation Toolkit.