We exist to prove it — through rigorous research, radical training, and a commitment to community knowledge that refuses to be explained away.
"Who gets to define what it means to want to die — and who profits from that definition?"
Monthly provocation — May 2026
We are a knowledge institution. We produce research, build capacity, and hold global mental health systems accountable — from a foundation rooted in the lived experience and community epistemologies of the Great Lakes region.
The Great Lakes Research Institute for Mental Health & Wellbeing was founded in 2025 by Moses Bwesige Mukasa — out of years of working in MHPSS and watching the same gap widen: between what communities actually know about suffering, and what global mental health systems are willing to recognise as knowledge.
We are registered in Uganda. We work across Uganda, DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania. We engage with the world — not as recipients of its frameworks, but as generators of our own.
We are not against global mental health. We are for something more honest, more rigorous, and more just. We operationalise decoloniality, intersectionality, and patriarchy theory — not as academic decoration but as living tools for transformation in practice, policy, and community life.
We understand suicide not as a clinical failure but as a deeply human, social, structural, and spiritual phenomenon — best understood through the voices of those who have lived it and the communities that hold it.
We champion Localisation within the Local — not as a funding process or a buzzword, but as a moral and relational commitment to the primacy of local knowledge, local governance, and local healing.
The person who survived, the family that held grief, the community that responded without a protocol — they know things no research paper has captured. We begin there.
Decoloniality, intersectionality, and patriarchy theory are not decorative. They are tools that must be operationalised in practice, policy, and community life.
It is structural. Political. Spiritual. Relational. Understanding it requires frameworks that hold all of these simultaneously — and communities that have always known this.
Not a funding process. Not a box to tick. A genuine transfer of knowledge authority, decision-making power, and relational trust to local communities.
We bring knowledge to global mental health conversations — not needs. We engage with WHO, donors, and INGOs as generators of our own frameworks.
Everything we do flows from a single commitment: that the Great Lakes region holds knowledge about suffering and healing that the world has not yet been willing to take seriously. We are here to change that.
Research rooted in lived experience, community epistemology, and theoretical rigour. We generate knowledge from this region — we do not simply consume it from elsewhere.
Approaching suicide through lived experience, explanatory theories, community epistemologies, and practices of prevention and response that exist outside clinical frameworks.
Taking decoloniality, patriarchy theory, and intersectionality from the seminar room into the hands of practitioners, communities, institutions, governments, and donors.
Supporting communities, civil society, governments, and donors to act on the truth that local knowledge is not a delivery context — it is a knowledge authority and healing system.
In the room. Challenging the room. Holding global mental health systems — their frameworks, their funding, their assumptions — accountable to the people they claim to serve.
The Okubaho Podcast. Whose Grave Is This? on YouTube. The Annual Great Lakes Lecture. Ideas taken seriously in public — without the softening that wellness culture demands.
Four interconnected research streams. All grounded in the Great Lakes. All in conversation with global discourse — on our own terms.
Our flagship intellectual contribution. This stream asks what structural, political, economic, and spiritual forces drive suicide in the region — and how communities understand and respond to it outside clinical frameworks. We take seriously explanatory theories from elders, healers, survivors, and families as primary evidence.
Current projects include our multi-country pluriversal study Dying in the Great Lakes, traditional healing responses mapping across Uganda, and the political economy of suicide in post-conflict northern Uganda.
A critical examination of the MHPSS architecture — the IASC guidelines, the humanitarian response frameworks, the clinical protocols that arrived with donor funding and stayed long after. We ask whose assumptions are embedded, who benefits, and what genuine community-led alternatives look like.
Current work includes critical evaluation of INGO mental health programming across the Great Lakes and the development of decolonial MHPSS frameworks emerging from community practice.
Systematic documentation and critical analysis of traditional healing practices across the Great Lakes. Not romanticisation — rigorous examination. We ask what these systems know, how they work, and what integration with clinical approaches looks like when it is done on equal terms rather than as absorption.
The Elder Knowledge Archive — an ongoing audio, visual, and textual record of elder understanding of distress and healing, community-owned and community-governed.
How does patriarchy shape who suffers in silence — and whose suffering gets named? This stream examines masculinity and suicide, the invisible burden on women as mental health infrastructure, and the compounding distress of displacement, ethnicity, disability, and class operating simultaneously.
Includes specific work on LGBTQ+ mental distress in contexts of legal and social persecution, and youth mental health beyond Western diagnostic categories.
"We do not approach suicide as a clinical problem with a clinical solution. We approach it as one of the deepest questions a human community can face — why does a person reach the point where living feels impossible? And what does it tell us about the world we have built together?"
Global suicide prevention is dominated by risk factor models, intervention protocols, and epidemiological framing. What gets erased is the person's own explanatory framework, the community's epistemology of suffering, and the practices of holding that have existed long before clinical guidelines arrived. We centre what gets erased.
Survivors and bereaved families are not research subjects. They are primary theorists. Their explanations of what happened — in their own language, through their own frameworks — are the most important evidence we have. We begin with them and we do not move them to the margins.
Before psychiatry, communities had explanations. Ancestral rupture. Broken relationships. Structural abandonment. Spiritual dislocation. These are not superstitions — they are sophisticated frameworks developed over generations of collective human experience. We take them seriously as theory, not as cultural background noise.
How does this community — in northern Uganda, eastern DRC, the highlands of Rwanda — understand what it means for a person to want to die? These epistemologies are plural, specific, and largely undocumented. We document them, examine them rigorously, and refuse to flatten them into a single explanatory model.
What communities actually do — the grandmother who stays close, the elder who opens a conversation, the ritual that re-anchors a person to their people — is not the background to the intervention. It is the intervention. We study it, document it, build on it, and refuse to call it informal just because it does not wear a clinical uniform.
We do not train people to deliver mental health services more efficiently. We build the capacity of practitioners, institutions, governments, and donors to think differently — and then act differently. We operationalise decoloniality, intersectionality, and patriarchy theory as living tools for transformation.
Who built MHPSS, who funded it, and what assumptions were embedded from the start? This course traces the architecture of global psychosocial support and equips practitioners to redesign their practice from an African philosophical and community-knowledge foundation.
For: MHPSS practitioners, NGO staff, community health workers, students globally
Lived experience as primary evidence. Explanatory frameworks from communities across the Great Lakes. Practices of prevention and response outside clinical protocols. Spiritual and ancestral frameworks taken seriously — not instrumentalised. Building community-led response systems.
For: Practitioners, policymakers, researchers, community leaders, advocates
From Crenshaw and Collins to African feminist contributions. Operationalising intersectionality in MHPSS assessment and response. How gender, class, ethnicity, displacement, and disability produce compounding distress — and what practice that holds all of this looks like.
For: Practitioners, researchers, advocates, gender specialists, programme designers
Participatory action research. Ethnographic methods for mental health contexts. Decolonial research ethics that go beyond informed consent. Community co-authorship in practice. Translating research into community action that communities actually own.
For: Researchers, programme staff, community workers building evidence for advocacy
For civil society organisations and community-based institutions. We walk alongside organisations as they articulate their own knowledge frameworks, build internal research capacity, and design programmes that emerge from community knowledge rather than donor templates.
For: Civil society organisations, CBOs, local implementing partners
Supporting national governments to audit mental health policy frameworks, develop policy that genuinely centres local knowledge, design legislation that recognises indigenous healing systems, and engage with WHO and UN frameworks from a position of informed authority.
For: Ministries of Health, national mental health authorities, donor agencies
"The aid and development sectors have made localisation a funding mechanism. We insist it is a moral and relational stance — a genuine transfer of knowledge authority to the communities that have always held it."
Localisation within the Local means that the local — its knowledge, its relationships, its ways of understanding and responding to suffering — is not a delivery context. It is a knowledge authority. A governance source. A healing system in its own right. We support every actor in the system to act on that truth.
We support communities to articulate, document, and assert their own frameworks for mental health and wellbeing — on their own terms, in their own language, without requiring translation into a donor framework first.
Technical support, training, and research partnership that strengthens intellectual and institutional capacity — not compliance with external frameworks. We help organisations answer to communities first.
Advisory support to national governments developing mental health policy that genuinely centres local knowledge, recognises indigenous healing systems, and builds accountability mechanisms that include communities in governance.
Support to redesign grant mechanisms that transfer decision-making authority — not just money. We work with donors who are genuinely willing to be challenged. We are not available for localisation as optics.
This is not a wellness platform. It is a public intellectual space where the hardest questions about suffering, suicide, and healing are asked without the softening that the global mental health industry demands.
"To Live — Conversations on Suffering, Healing & the Right to Be Understood"
Monthly long-form conversations rooted in the intellectual framework of the institute. Survivors, healers, philosophers, activists, and community leaders. Deep, intimate, and uncompromising. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Show notes include full academic references and discussion guides for community and classroom use.
"Suicide, Suffering & the Politics of Who Gets to Explain It"
Bi-monthly video conversations that stop the scroll and demand a response. The visual companion to Okubaho — provocative, intellectually alive, and visually rooted in the aesthetics of the Great Lakes. Each episode includes discussion questions for training programmes and community groups. This show never becomes comfortable. That is its purpose.
Long-form essays, responses to breaking developments in global mental health, and community voices from practitioners, elders, survivors, and students. Published monthly. Rigorous. Readable. Never neutral on what matters.
One major public lecture per year. Hosted in Kampala. Livestreamed globally. A major thinker engaged with the institute's core questions. Published as an annual lecture paper in the institute's working paper series.
We engage with WHO, the Lancet Commission, IASC, and donor agencies — not to validate their frameworks but to challenge them from a position of rigorous, grounded knowledge. We are inside these conversations and we do not soften what we find.
Annual publication tracking government mental health budgets, policy frameworks, and INGO programming across Uganda, DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania. Submitted to parliaments, UN agencies, and donors. Open access. No softening.
Ongoing tracking of what conditions international funders attach to mental health programming in the region. What comes with the money. Published transparently. This project exists because the relationship between funding and intellectual independence deserves scrutiny — including our own.
Submissions to UPR processes on mental health. Engagement with WHO mental health action plan implementation. Participation in IASC MHPSS Reference Group. Shadow reports alongside government submissions. We are inside these rooms asking the questions nobody else is asking.
Not all partnerships are equal. Communities set the agenda. Knowledge partners build with us. Resource partners answer to both.
We are committed to institutional independence. We accept funding from a range of sources — but no single funder sets our research agenda. No partnership requires us to adopt frameworks we have not critically examined. Communities we work with are partners, not subjects. We publish this pledge and we hold ourselves accountable to it publicly — including through our Donor Accountability Project.
Whether you are a practitioner, researcher, community leader, government official, donor, journalist, or someone who simply found us and felt something shift — we want to hear from you.
We are based in Kampala, Uganda. We work across the Great Lakes. We are in conversation with the world.