Nita Senesathith (she/her) was a summer intern with the Global Mental Health Programs in 2020 and returned to serve as a Management Intern in 2023. Currently, she works as a Research Assistant at the Trauma and Community Resilience Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. As part of her summer work with the Center in 2020, she worked with Dr. Sabrina Hermosilla to help Roots of Health, a reproductive health organization in the Philippines, find mental health trainings/interventions for their staff to provide to LGBTQ youth. She did both academic and grey literature searches for trainings that have been done around the globe to see which ones could potentially be implemented in the Philippines. In the end, she drafted a summary page for each of the top three trainings she found. Roots of Health will then draft grant proposals and find potential donors to help implement the trainings. Nita was able to learn about different global mental health careers through the weekly Brown Bag Lunch and Professional Development seminars. She was also grateful for her chance as an intern to take part in the CUGMHP Instagram Takeover Day to tell people more about mental health in Laos, her home country. Through her time as a summer intern, Nita learned so much about global mental health, developed her interests, and met amazing professionals in the field. As a 2023 Management Intern, Nita interviewed and selected candidates for the internship, facilitated weekly seminars, organized a Team Building Day, and collaborated on the end of year report for funders. She also gets the opportunity to work on Dr. Ali Giusto’s research project on the pilot randomized control trial of a task-shifted intervention to improve father depression and child outcomes in Kenya. Nita will be pursuing an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford in Fall 2023 and hopes to ultimately pursue a PhD focusing on Global Mental Health to develop community-based mental health interventions in Laos.
