Mapping the EA Psychology/Mental Health Space
The Map
We’ve created a public spreadsheet outlining the main organizations in the EA mental health space.
Purpose
Our goal is to foster collaboration within the EA mental health community. Many organizations, groups, and individuals are working to improve mental health globally and within the EA community specifically, but there’s a lack of awareness and connection between them. The space would benefit from having access to a more highly integrated network to coordinate related efforts.
This spreadsheet also serves as a tool for community members to get connected to the mental health resources that will support their well-being and learn what is happening in the mental health space.
EA Mental Health Working Group
We’ve started a working group that aims to identify and implement cost-effective interventions to improve wellbeing at scale. If you have any insights, ideas or expertise to share, or would like to provide feedback on our current plans, please reach out to us (contact info below.)
Emails:
Feedback
This document is a work in progress, please comment if you know of organizations or resources that aren’t already listed or if you know of any updates to the ones we have listed. We would love to hear your input!
Thanks for putting this together. It might be a substantially bigger lift, but I’d also be interested to see a list of major academic labs or researchers working in the mental health space that seem highly relevant for scalably improving mental health e.g., researchers looking at plausibly scalable mental health interventions in low income countries, and low cost digital mental health interventions. Naturally this would be somewhat more subjective, but could be a rough crowdsourced list that you curate/trim depending on your judgments, if you were open to doing something like that.
I say this because I sometimes get the sense that some people in EA believe there is very little research in this area besides what these known EA-related orgs are doing, but there is quite a lot of relevant research out there from which ideas and data could be drawn.
As an example of the type of researcher who might go on such a list—Claudi Bockting https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=agorRp4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao (who has as a major research focus “Increasing accessibility of effective psychological interventions in low and middle income countries using technology and/or non-specialists”).
Vikram Patel and Shekhar Saxena are pretty prolific researchers in this space too. Both are relatively easy to contact—I reached out to both and both got back to me pretty quickly
This is fantastic. I’ve seen movements be greatly helped by this kind of central information mapping. It makes a huge difference...we will remember the times before this map and everything after will be different.
I encourage everyone to read Happier Lives Institute final report on lay therapy in LMICs recently released after a long wait.