When you look at the numbers, it’s easy to gape in horror. In Ghana, a nation of 32 million people, there are only 62 psychiatrists. Zimbabwe, with a population of 15 million, has only 19 psychiatrists.

And in Uganda, there are 47 psychiatrists serving a country of 48 million — less than one single psychiatrist for every million people.

These are staggering ratios. To get your head around them, take the US as a comparison. There are around 45,000 psychiatrists for all 333 million Americans, which translates to about 135 psychiatrists for every million people. That’s still not enough — experts are actually warning of an escalating shortage — and yet it’s a whopping 135 times more coverage than exists in Uganda.

These numbers have very real, and sometimes very brutal, implications for people’s lives. When psychiatry and other forms of professional mental health care are not accessible, people suffer in silence or turn to whatever options they can find. In Ghana, for instance, thousands of desperate families bring their ailing loved ones to “prayer camps” in hopes of healing, only to find that the self-styled prophets there chain their loved ones to trees. Instead of receiving medical treatment for, say, schizophrenia, the patients receive prayers.

The scandal of mental health care in developing countries has been well documented, and surveying it, you could be forgiven for thinking the solution is straightforward: These countries just need to train more psychiatrists and mental health professionals of the type you’d find in the US.

Specifically, these nations have been serving as a proving ground for a model called community-based care, where non-specialist providers or lightly trained laypeople — picture someone like your grandmother, not a doctor — deliver brief mental health interventions in informal settings like homes or parks.

Whereas importing Western norms can alienate local populations, who may not view mental health problems as medical, brain-based problems, community-based care has found acceptance because it pays attention to cultural context. Lay counsellors meet patients where they are — both literally, in terms of physical space, and conceptually, in terms of their beliefs about mental health.

This model has turned out to be not only cheap to operate and easy to scale, but also incredibly effective for treating issues like depression. So effective, in fact, that the model is now being exported to the US, which stands to learn a lot from these poorer countries.

Read the full article about mental healthcare models by Sigal Samuel at Vox.