José Ángel García-Pacheco is a consultant with the Columbia-WHO Center for Global Mental Health and formerly a civil servant in the government of Mexico City. He has a degree in physical anthropology from the National School of Anthropology and History and a master’s degree in population and development studies from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Mexico. His expertise is based on the management, analysis and interpretation of population-based surveys, survey design and online survey data collection. He has applied this knowledge to address public health issues in mental disorders, suicide, substance use, interpersonal violence, migration, mortality and comorbidity between diabetes and depression.
He is currently a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, where his interests focus on mental health policy inattention, mental health systems evaluation, and mental health policy entrepreneurs. He has authored and co-authored several research articles and book chapters. As a Global Mental Health Scholar from 2020 – 2024, under the mentorship of Dr. Geoffrey M. Reed, he has collaborated on projects such as the ICD-11 field studies, the impact of COVID-19 on members belonging to the Global Clinical Practice Network, and the World Health Organization Mental Health Atlas 2020 project. Currently, he is collaborating with the Columbia-WHO Center for Global Mental Health on the the implementation of the “Flexible Interview for ICD-11” (FLII-11), and the World Health Organization Mental Health Atlas 2024 project.