Dr Tasneem Kathree presented the “Co-Development of a Community Mental Health Education and Detection Tool (CMED Child and Adolescent): Children and Adolescents” at the 7th Global Mental Health Summit held, from 10 to 12 November 2025, in Cape Town at the iconic City Hall.
This Summit brings together global leaders, researchers, policymakers, and people with lived experience to drive progress in mental health care. It’s a key platform for sharing innovation, strengthening partnerships, and ensuring mental health stays high on the global health agenda. For South Africa, participation highlights local achievements and ensures African voices help shape global priorities for equitable, community-based care.
In the context of widespread poor mental health literacy and a gap in community-based screening systems for children and adolescents, we aim to co-develop a Community Mental health Education and Detection (CMED Child and Adolescent) tool for children and adolescents. This tool is based on the CMED for adults, adopted for use by the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health (KZNDoH), for use by Community Health Worker (CHW) teams. The purpose of the CMED Child and Adolescent is to promote mental health literacy and build self-help and coping capacities in families, and assist CHWs to identify possible mental health conditions in children and adolescents (ages 6 -17) and enable appropriate linkage to care.
A human-centred design promoting inclusivity of affected communities was used to co-develop the tool with key stakeholders, to ensure the contextual utility and fit of the tool for the end user. Based on the most common issues identified during formative research with children/adolescents and parents/caregivers five vignettes with accompanying illustrations were developed for feedback from stakeholder groups in order to refine the CMED Child and Adolescent for testing for accuracy and feasibility.
This study is funded by the SAMRC and the Child Mind Institute.
We also wish to acknowledge the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health and the National Department of Health.
