Prevention of common mental disorders among women in the perinatal period: a critical mixed-methods review and meta-analysis.

Perinatal depression and anxiety account for a high burden of perinatal morbidity and poor psychosocial functioning. There is a growing interest among mental health professionals, to devise interventions to prevent this condition. This review synthesizes evidence for the effectiveness of psychological and psychosocial interventions aimed at the prevention of perinatal depression and anxiety.

Effectiveness of a technology-assisted, family volunteers delivered, brief, multicomponent parents' skills training intervention for children with developmental disorders in rural Pakistan: a cluster randomized controlled trial.

Background: Globally, there is a large documented gap between needs of families and children with developmental disorders and available services. We adapted the World Health Organization's mental health Gap-Intervention Guidelines (mhGAP-IG) developmental disorders module into a tablet-based android application to train caregivers of children with developmental disorders. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of this technology-assisted, family volunteers delivered, parents' skills training intervention to improve functioning in children with developmental disorders in a rural community of Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Cultural Adaptation of Community Informant Tool for Detection of Maternal Depression in Rural Pakistan.

Evidence indicates that mental health issues like depression, epilepsy, and substance misuse can be detected with reasonable accuracy in resource-poor settings. The Community Informant Detection Tool (CIDT) is one such approach used for detecting mental health problems, including depression. We adapted this community informant approach for detecting maternal depression in Pakistan.

Parents' perspectives on care of children with autistic spectrum disorder in South Asia - Views from Pakistan and India.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects about 1.4% of the population in South Asia but very few have access to any form of health care service. The objective of this study was to explore the beliefs and practices related to the care of children with ASD to inform strategies for intervention.

Family networks to improve outcomes in children with intellectual and developmental disorders: a qualitative study.

Background: There are at least 50 million children with an intellectual or developmental disorder in South Asia. The vast majority of these children have no access to any service and there are no resources to develop such services. We aimed to explore a model of care-delivery for such children, whereby volunteer family members of affected individuals could be organized and trained to form an active, empowered group within the community that, a) using a task-sharing approach, are trained by specialists to provide evidence-based interventions to their children; b) support each other, with the more experienced FaNs i.