How Dr. Brandon Kohrt is Expanding Access to Mental Health Care
- Lori Preci and Aidan Schurr
- Aug 10
- 7 min read
From documentary filmmaker to global health pioneer, Brandon Kohrt has transformed the landscape of mental health care worldwide. By combining deep cultural insight with scientific rigor and technological innovation, Kohrt is building more inclusive, effective, and scalable mental health systems for the future, especially in underserved communities across the globe.
When Observation Became Intervention
Brandon Kohrt did not begin his career in a clinic or a lab, but instead behind a camera. As an undergraduate student at University of Southern California in the late 1990s, he journeyed to Nepal to document the reintegration of child soldiers into society following the country’s decade-long Maoist People’s War. Immersed in rural villages lacking formal healthcare infrastructure, Kohrt witnessed first-hand the extensive psychological trauma of war and the near-total absence of mental health support.
The resulting documentary, Returned: Child Soldiers of Nepal’s Maoist Army, premiered at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre during the 2008 Artivist Film Festival, earning the Artivist Award for Children’s Advocacy and later winning Best Documentary Short at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival. Beyond acclaim, the project sparked Kohrt’s commitment to confronting the urgent question of what came next for the children he had followed on-screen. He came to see that their trauma was not isolated but reflected a far-reaching mental health crisis affecting entire communities.
In a country of nearly 23 million, with fewer than a dozen psychiatrists nationwide, most concentrated in the capital Kathmandu, formal mental health care was almost entirely out of reach. Where services did exist, they relied on Western frameworks ill-suited to local realities. Kohrt recognized that importing Western psychiatric models was not only impractical but also risked reinforcing stigma and alienating those most in need of care. Effective solutions would need to leverage the existing social and cultural networks — families, spiritual leaders, and traditional healers — already integral to Nepali society.
Reimagining Mental Health Infrastructure
Back in the United States, Kohrt shifted his focus to the urgent question that had emerged during his time in Nepal: how can mental health services be scaled in low-resource settings without losing cultural relevance? To pursue this, Kohrt enrolled in a joint MD-PhD program at Emory University, where he studied psychiatry and anthropology. This dual training deepened his conviction that mental health is not only individual but fundamentally relational, inseparable from the well-being of families, social networks, and broader cultural systems that shape daily life.
During his studies, Kohrt encountered the World Health Organization’s Mental Health Gap Action Program (mhGAP), a global initiative aimed at closing the treatment gap in countries with limited psychiatric resources. One of mhGAP’s core strategies, known as “task-sharing,” offered a promising alternative to traditional specialist driven models. Rather than waiting for a system to produce more psychiatrists or psychologists, task-sharing trains lay providers such as non-specialist nurses, midwives, and community volunteers to identify and deliver front-line care for common mental conditions. Kohrt recognized that this approach aligned with what he had observed in Nepal: care delivered by trusted community members, grounded in local norms and relationships, was often more effective and acceptable than top-down clinical interventions.
Kohrt became both a practitioner and evaluator of this strategy. In a 2025 scoping review he co-authored, Kohrt and his colleagues examined dozens of task-sharing programs across diverse global contexts. The results were striking: beyond expanding access to care, task-sharing often elevated the social status of community health providers and increased their sense of self-efficacy. These shifts helped embed mental health services into the everyday fabric of community life, creating sustainable, culturally relevant care networks in places where formal systems had long fallen short.
To further evaluate task-sharing operations in practice, Kohrt joined Ugandan colleagues on a landmark cluster-randomized trial of Group Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT-G), a 16-session, evidence-based intervention originally developed to treat depression. Delivered by trained lay counselors, IPT-G helps participants link mood changes to life events and develop strategies for managing interpersonal stress. The results were dramatic: before treatment, 86% of participants met diagnostic criteria for major depression; four months later that figure had fallen to 6.5% in IPT-G villages compared to 54.7% in controls. The 79% relative reduction was sustained six months later, setting a new global benchmark for psychological interventions delivered by non-specialists in low-resource settings.
Tackling Stigma from Within
Despite comprehensive technical training, Kohrt observed that many lay health workers still harbored deep-seated prejudices, rooted in cultural myths or fear, against those with mental illness, often leading to missed diagnoses and inadequate care.
Drawing on the success of HIV/AIDS stigma-reduction methods, which demonstrated that structured social contact with individuals living with HIV has demonstrably shifted healthcare workers beliefs and behaviors, Kohrt partnered with people with lived experience (PWLE) of mental illness, program designers, and mhGAP trainers to co-develop RESHAPE, reducing stigma among healthcare providers. In RESHAPE modules, PWLE moves beyond static textbook examples to serve as active educators who share personal recovery narratives, provide feedback on clinical role-plays, and even serve as mentors to newly trained clinicians. This immersive approach transforms stigma-reduction into an active, relational process grounded in empathy.
In Nepal, the impact was measurable. Pilot studies showed significant reductions in stigma and implicit bias, along with improved diagnostic accuracy and treatment adherence. In a 34-clinic study, real patient diagnoses were 72.5% accurate among clinicians trained with RESHAPE versus 34.5% in the implementation-as-usual arm of the study. Beyond the data, trainees reported feeling a sense of “accountability” to their PWLE mentors.
By embedding structured social contact into clinical education, RESHAPE went beyond technical skill-building, fostering empathy and challenging deep-seated biases. The result was not just more skilled providers, but a more humane system of care.
Integrating Technology Into Human Care
Recognizing that many remote Nepali communities lack reliable roads, electricity, or supervisory oversight, Kohrt’s teams also sought to increase in-person support without overburdening already scarce human resources. To do this, they developed StandStrong, a hybrid intervention that combines a behavioral activation curriculum with passive sensing to support care delivery in hard to reach areas. The five-session curriculum helps patients identify and schedule simple, mood-lifting activities - such as going for a walk or reconnecting with others - to interrupt the cycle of depression marked by withdrawal and avoidance.
What makes StandStrong unique is its integration of passive sensing, which uses everyday smartphone features, like GPS, Bluetooth, and microphone snippets, to collect behavioral data on movement, proximity, and ambient speech. These signals are used to generate a privacy-safe “digital phenotype”: a visual snapshot of a patient's daily routines and activity levels, captured without requiring any manual input. This data allows counselors to monitor progress remotely and tailor support in real time, even in areas where face to face supervision isn't feasible.
A 2024 proof-of-concept study in Nepal involving 24 adolescent and young mothers showed meaningful improvements in depression symptoms across all participants, as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory — a widely used clinical scale for assessing the severity of depressive symptoms. Counselors used color-coded heat maps generated from passive sensing data to tailor behavioral “homework” for each patient, such as encouraging a daily walk outside the home.
The results demonstrated StandStrong’s strength: using low-bandwidth technology to enrich, rather than replace, human care — making therapy more personalized, even from a distance. For rural communities with limited access to mental health services, tools like StandStrong offer more than scalability; they provide a culturally adaptable lifeline, showcasing how digital support can extend the reach of therapy without overwhelming providers.
Standardizing Quality on a Global Scale
As mental health task-sharing initiatives and digital therapies expanded worldwide, each tailored to unique languages, cultures, and resource levels, Kohrt identified a new critical challenge: ensuring that these varied programs maintain standards of safety and efficacy.
Together with WHO and UNICEF, Kohrt led the development of EQUIP (Ensuring Quality in Psychosocial and Mental Health Care), a free digital platform designed to standardize training, supervision, and competency assessment across diverse settings.
At the core of EQUIP is the ENACT (Enhancing Assessment of Common therapeutic factors) checklist, and 18-item rating scale that captures essential counseling skills, such as empathy, active listening, and collaborative goal-setting. Trainees upload video recordings of actual or role-played sessions, which are then scored by remote supervisors or through semi-automated prompts; the platform flags any potentially harmful practices such as the use of dismissive language and highlights strengths to reinforce. This structured feedback loop not only helps individual providers refine their skills but also generates aggregate data on training program performance, identifying areas where curriculum updates or additional sessions are needed.
Since its public launch in March 2022, EQUIP has logged over 10,000 competency assessments across 794 programs in 36 countries, involving more than 3,760 frontline providers. Early analyses show an 18% average improvement in observable healthcare provider skills compared to traditional lecture-based instruction. In creating a transparent, data-driven system for monitoring and enhancing counselor competencies, Kohrt ensured that scale would not come at the expense of quality.
Building a Global Hub in Washington, D.C.
In Washington D.C., Kohrt serves as the Charles and Sonia Akman Professor of Global Psychiatry at George Washington University and founding director of the Center for Global Mental Health Equity, shaping a dedicated space on the Foggy Bottom campus where rigorous academic research and hands-on field experience converge.
As Scientific Co-Chair of NIH Fogarty’s Health research in Humanitarian Crises initiative and an academic partner-lead on WHO/UNICEF’s EQUIP platform, he continues to set global competency standards for non-specialist psychological care and oversees digital tools that support providers in over 40 countries.
Since 2010, Kohrt has consulted to The Carter Center’s Liberia Mental-Health Initiative, co-designing anti-stigma radio campaigns and community-nurse training curricula that now underpin the Center’s own workshops and remote coaching programs.
Through this Washington-based hub, Kohrt ensures that lessons first learned in post-conflict Kathmandu now inform cutting-edge research, policy dialogues, and scalable, equity-driven interventions around the world, completing a global-to-local cycle.
Symbiosis as a Professional Philosophy
Reflecting on his journey, Kohrt often returns to a guiding principle: progress in global mental health is shaped as much by relationships as by ambition. He describes this approach as symbiotic career planning — a philosophy that emphasizes building a path not only around personal goals, but around the people and partnerships that sustain meaningful work as well. It’s a lesson rooted in his earliest experiences in Nepal and one that continues to shape his work today. Advancing global mental health depends on connection, not just between patients and providers, but among colleagues, communities, and systems across borders.
Drawing on anthropology, implementation science, and digital innovation, Kohrt builds interventions that are deeply rooted in local contexts yet designed for global impact. For him, the most enduring solutions are those built through mutual learning, where knowledge moves in every direction and relationships define the roadmap.
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