Melanie Amna Abas

Melanie Amna Abas is a British psychiatric epidemiologist who is Professor of Global Mental Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. She is a consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, co-director of the NIHR Global Health Research Group African Youth in Mind, and leads the National Institutes of Health TENDAI Clinical Trial.

Early life and education
Amna Abas attended the University of Birmingham, where she studied medicine. She moved to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in epidemiology. Her doctoral research at the University of Auckland evaluated socio-economic deprivation and length of psychiatric inpatient stay. Long stays in hospital are associated with a poor health outcome, and Amna Abas demonstrated that greater deprivation is associated with longer stays in hospital.

Research and career
Amna Abas has dedicated her career to understanding depression amongst different demographic groups. Her early research explored the social causes of depression amongst Zimbabwean women. She was the first to show how cross-cultural events could cause depression. For example, she studied the effectiveness of the friendship bench mental health programme, and showed that co-morbid anxiety was a predictor of persistent depression. She argued that the psychological treatments proposed for use in lower middle income country and resource-limited settings (e.g. problem solving and interpersonal therapy) do not target fear, avoidance and worry. Amna Abas expanded her studies to other regions, including Thailand, Sri Lanka and Moldova.

At the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, Amna Abas established a research group focused on scalable global mental health interventions. It uses social science and cultural analysis to develop contextually appropriate interventions for low-income countries. She has explored how behavioural interventions impact adherence with medical advice for conditions including HIV.

Academic service
Amna Abas has focssed on capacity building amongst African researchers. She has contributed to the US-African Medical Education Partnership Initiative, which provides training to early and mid-career researchers across Africa. She is the King's College London partner for the African Mental Health Research initiative.