Professor, Clinical Psychiatry; Director, Mental Wellness Equity Center
Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute
New York, New York
Milton L. Wainberg, MD, is a Latinx Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is the Director of the Mental Wellness Equity Center at Columbia Psychiatry, and the Founding Chair of the Caucus of Global Mental Health and Psychiatry at the American Psychiatric Association. He is a Venezuelan, American, and Brazilian researcher, clinician, and educator whose work has focused on bringing research to practice within public health systems of care and on training the next generation of mental health clinicians and researchers.
Dr. Wainberg has been involved in domestic and international NIMH, NIAA, NIDA, and CDC-funded projects addressing substance use/mental disorders in the US, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South America. His implementation research uses Community Based Participatory Patient Centered Research to engage communities as partners in his projects. Dr. Wainberg leads inter-disciplinary and multi-cultural research teams focused on enhancing real-world clinical treatment by disseminating and scaling up evidence-based interventions within systems of care in low- and middle-income countries and low resource setting in the US. He leads four NIH-funded Implementation Science Fellowships: one in the US, two in sub-Saharan Africa, and one in the Asia-Pacific Region. His work has developed innovative training and research programs aiming to decrease the global mental health treatment gap as well as the global mental health research gap in poor resource settings.
Dr. Wainberg developed an ultra-brief comprehensive mental health screening and triage tool, the mental wellness tool, which can assess with high sensitivity with 3-items the presence of any psychiatric disorder both at the individual level and among relatives, and with 9 more questions, quickly and with good specificity, categorizes individuals into care for common mental disorders, severe mental disorders, substance use disorders and suicide risk. He has developed a training and services digital platform that guides lay-personnel under supervision by mental health specialist to provide rigorous quality community mental health care in low resource settings using evidence-based treatments. This work, developed in sub-Saharan Africa, is about to be scaled-up in New York State. The New York State Office of Mental Health is creating a novel Community Mental Wellness Workforce that will use Dr. Wainberg’s digital platform to help decrease the mental health disparities in the US.
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Tuesday, April 12, 2022
2:15 PM – 3:15 PM
