Dr. Shabab Wahid is an assistant professor of global health at Georgetown University’s School of Health and a global mental health researcher working at the intersection of culture, climate, and wellbeing, with active studies in Bangladesh, Kenya, Senegal, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

In this episode of Thrive Dispatches, Dr. Wahid joins Dr. Matt Biel to explore what cross-cultural science tells us about how people experience mental distress. They start with the study that drew Wahid into the field, in which people with schizophrenia in the United States described voices that were harsh and punitive, while people in India and Ghana described companions and friends.

They then trace his research in Bangladesh linking sustained heat, separated statistically from floods and storms, to depression and anxiety, and the grief he documents in communities watching their home environments change in front of their eyes.

And they dig into his central methodological contribution: how to build mental health interventions that communities recognize, trust, and want to use. That means learning how a community understands the mind, which words people use for distress, and what a good outcome looks like in local terms, from addressing tension in South Asia to supporting a calm heart in Senegal.

The lesson of the conversation is a sequence: listen first, then adapt, then treat. A clinic for depression sees no visitors due to stigma; a program for tension brings people back, with friends or spouses at the second session. The sequence holds at home too, down to the question therapists in Nepal ask their young clients: depression like normal depression, or depression where you need help?

In this video episode of Thriving Together, hosts Maya Smith and Jason Lehmbeck speak with Dr.

Mary Ann Woodruff and Rachel Lettieri, LCSW, of Pediatrics Northwest, a pediatric group that

has served families in the South Sound region of Washington for more than 50 years.

Mary Ann is a general pediatrician who saw patients for 36 years and is now the Medical

Director of Care Transformation as well as the Washington Medical Director for Reach Out and

Read.

Rachel directs Care Transformation and built the practice’s community health worker division.

Both were fellows in the Thrive Center’s Innovation Hub.

Pediatrics Northwest treats the pediatric medical home as a universal touchpoint, the one place

nearly every family returns to with their child, and uses it to bridge physical health, behavioral

health, and unmet social needs.

Community health workers from the community accompany families: they help navigate

systems like early intervention and behavioral health, reduce stressors, and build the confidence

to make a first call. The team has protected one non-billable day a week for community health

workers to be out building relationships with the resources they connect families to, a choice

they have held for four years even while billing Medicaid for those services. Their work grew

from a Medicaid waiver grant for collaborative care and behavioral health integration in 2018

and 2019, and it is part of Pediatrics Supporting Parents, a five-community national initiative

with Zero to Three to strengthen early relational health in well-child visits.

The through-line, in Mary Ann’s words: children’s brains develop in relationships, not systems,

and so our systems have to catch up with that science.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Alison Peak, a clinical social worker

specializing in early childhood mental health and the Executive Director of Allied

Behavioral Health Solutions, a behavioral health practice with sites across Tennessee.

Before any of that, Alison grew up deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, in a

place where predictable routines created safety even during times of scarcity, and

where relationships were the foundation of a wide web of informal support.

In their conversation, Alison and Matt explore the difference between formal systems,

the agencies with long acronyms and eligibility requirements, and the informal ones, the

networks of relationships and predictable rhythms that decide who shows up for whom

when times get hard.

Alison’s clinical anchor is a definition she returns to often. “My favorite definition of infant

and early childhood mental health is the capacity to love well and grow well.”

For young children, she explains, relationships are not one factor among many. They

are the thing that determines whether a child makes it to adulthood at all.