From Nigeria & Across Africa: A Mental Health Mission - Professor Nandini Chakraborty

There are clinicians whose international work announces itself in headlines, and others whose contributions take a quieter shape. Professor Nandini Chakraborty belongs to the latter group, and NPUK is honoured to welcome her as a forthcoming guest speaker.

Nandini is a Consultant Psychiatrist in Early Intervention in Psychosis at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and Professor at the University of Leicester. Her clinical, educational, and academic standing is considerable, but it is not what brings her closest to the work NPUK exists to support.

That closer point lies in Nigeria.

Through a long partnership between Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, the UK mental health charity ACCEPT, and the Nigeria Health Care Project, Nandini has been a steady presence in community mental health work in Benue State. The centrepiece of that engagement has been Edawu, a rehabilitation unit established in 1996 in a rural part of the state, where people who had been made homeless by mental illness were cared for, and reunited with families who had often given up hope. Edawu has not stood still. Its centre of gravity has shifted, deliberately and over time, from inpatient rehabilitation toward earlier identification and community-based care.

Nandini has also worked, through the World Health Organisation's Mental Health Gap Action Programme, with primary care workers across centres affiliated to the Nigeria Health Care Project. In contexts where a single trained clinician may be the only resource a community has, that work is foundational. Her published reflections on this work are notable for what they do not contain. There is no condescension and no pretence that visiting clinicians arrive with all the answers. Her stated hope for Edawu is one many in the NPUK community will recognise. That the partnership eventually becomes fully Nigerian-led, with the international link continuing as one of mutual benefit rather than dependence.

It is this disposition, more than any single intervention, that makes her engagement with NPUK meaningful. The careful long view. The willingness to remain in conversation with a place across years rather than weeks. The instinct to build rather than to be seen building. The scaling of her missionary work to other African countries including Malawi, Uganda and Ghana.

We welcome Prof Nandini Chakraborty warmly, and look forward to what she will share with our members in our Town Hall Meeting

For more information, please see npuk.org.uk