Journal of Pregnancy and Child Health
Open Access

Manasi Kumar

Department of Psychiatry University of Nairobi, Kenya

Biography

Manasi Kumar is senior lecturer and a chartered clinical Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. She leads the Maternal and Child Mental Health Outcomes group at the University. The focus of her research has been towards building evidence for child health (physical and mental) outcomes attributable to maternal depression and social adversities experienced by women in Kenya. Manasi is particularly interested in developing psychotherapeutic outcomes that are culture and gender-sensitive and that that take into account livelihood options of young girls and women with depression. At UoN, her main clinical focus involves training clinical psychology students in psychotherapy skills and offering clinical supervision for postgraduate clinical psychology and undergraduate& postgraduate medicine students in psychological assessment, first aid and management. Having worked on mental health issues in vulnerable child populations in Delhi (Vikram Sarabhai Foundation & University of Delhi), Dharamsala (with Tibetan Govt in exile), London (with Anna Freud Centre, UCL), with child survivors of Gujarat earthquake and riots (SEWA, Gujarat); more recently, she is collaborating with researchers in Makerere University, Uganda; New York School of Medicine, US; University of Granada, Spain to develop proposals on neurodevelopment of HIV+ children in Kenya, parenting practices in Kenya and South-South collaboration on MH training. Manasi is particularly interested in extending her work into forays such as impact of childhood adversities & poverty on long term development and gender-mental health linkages in developing country contexts using perspectives from critical psychology, sociology and development studies. For the past four years, she has been involved in capacity building programmes training psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical school undergrads in identifying child mental health problems and teaching trauma counseling skills in India, Kenya and Uganda.

Publications

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