Dr Vikram Patel, PhD is a psychiatrist and researcher best known for his work on leveraging community resources to address mental health problems. Dr Patel was educated at the University of Mumbai, (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, 1987), the University of Oxford (Master of Science, 1989) and the University of London where he was awarded a PhD in 1997 for research on mental disorders in Harare. He became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1992.
Dr Patel’s work spans a wide variety of topics and disciplines including, but not limited to, epidemiology, psychiatry, clinical psychology, disability, neurological disease, non-communicable diseases, public health, substance abuse, economic evaluation, and implementation research. His primary interest, however, is in global mental health, specifically the reducing disparities in access to quality care for people with mental health problem, in particular in low-resource settings.
He is the Co-Founder and former Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).  He is the Co-founder and former Director of the Centre for Control of Chronic Conditions, Public Health Foundation of India and the Co-Founder and Member of the Managing Committee, Sangath, an Indian NGO which has pioneered task-sharing experiments in the areas of child development, adolescent health and mental health. Sangath won the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008 and the WHO Public Health Champion of India award in 2016. He founded and leads the Global Mental Health@Harvard intiative.
He was supported by a series of Wellcome Trust Fellowships (UK) since 2000, and was awarded a Principal Research Fellowship in 2015. He is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences. He has been awarded the Chalmers Medal, the Sarnat Prize, the Pardes Humanitarian Prize, an Honorary OBE and the John Dirk Canada Gairdner Award in Global Health. He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Georgetown University, York University and Stellenbosch University. He was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.

He has served on four Government of India committees which include the Mental Health Policy Group (which drafted India’s first national mental health policy, launched on October 10th, 2014); he also serves on several WHO Committees (Mental Health; Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health; High-Level Committee on NCDs).  He was co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health of the National Institute for Mental Health, USA and was the Chair of the Disease Control Priorities Network group on mental, neurological and substance use disorders. His recent books include Patel, et al,  Disease Control Priorities for mental, neurological and substance use disorders (World Bank, 2015); Thornicroft & Patel, Global Mental Health Trials (OUP, 2014); Patel et al, the School Counsellor Casebook (Byword, 2014); Patel et al, Global Mental Health: Principles and Practice (OUP, 2013).  He is the Lead editor of the Lancet series on global mental health (2007 and 2011), the PLoS Medicine series on packages of care for mental disorders (2009) and the Lancet series on universal health care in India (2011). He is the co-editor of three Lancet Commissions (on global mental health, 2018; depression, 2022; and UHC in India, in preparation). He has 589 scientific articles published in peer reviewed journals and is ranked in the top 0.1% of scientists globally in terms of citations. He has delivered over a dozen named orations and a TED Global lecture. His book Where There Is No Psychiatrist has been translated in over 15 languages.
“This comprehensive work empowers healthcare workers in under-resourced and developing communities to build much-needed mental health care into all aspects of existing services.” — Amazon.com review of “Where There Is No Psychiatrist”