Dr Abhijit Nadkarni

Abhijit is an addictions psychiatrist and global mental health researcher. He is currently based in Sangath, Goa (India), where he is the Director of the Addictions Research Group. His research interests encompass global mental health, particularly alcohol use disorders in low resource settings.

Currently, he is leading or collaborating on several projects in India funded by grants from MRC-UK, NIHR-UK, and Wellcome-DBT. These include projects as diverse as examining the burden of domestic violence related to alcohol use, and developing and evaluating technology based interventions for alcohol use disorders and tobacco use. Abhijit is actively involved in the capacity building of mental health researchers and lay health workers. He tutors on the MSc in Global Mental Health, and Leadership in Mental Health courses for the Pacific Islands and Eastern Mediterranean region. He is the also the Course Director on the Leadership in Mental Health, Sangath’s flagship annual international short course in Goa. He continues to train lay health workers in community-based mental health care programmes at several sites in India, and Nepal. He is a member of Government of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s task force to develop operational guidelines for the integration of mental healthcare services  into a comprehensive primary health care service package.