We sat down with Dr. Desrosiers to discuss her work and future prospects in global mental health. 

What is your favorite part of the research process?

“My favorite part of the research process is developing relationships with other people, working together on a project, and seeing it to fruition. I love learning from my colleagues throughout this process and coming together as a team.”

How do you hope your work impacts communities around the world?

“I hope that my research helps even a few people to better cope with mental health challenges and to feel less alone in their struggles.”

What are phrases that guide your work?

“Co-creating mental health solutions with and for communities”

 “Building pathways, from evidence to equity in global mental health”

Dr. Desrosiers stands out for her fresh approaches and collaborative spirit, as her research is redefining how communities around the world not only access, but sustain mental health care. As the field quickly evolves in response to urgent global needs and emerging technologies, she shares her insights on how community-driven approaches and innovative tools can help transform mental health care for youth and families worldwide.

With a focus on “meeting youth and families where they are”, Dr. Desrosiers’s work blends task-sharing, digital tools, and integrated care to design mental health systems that are both accessible and culturally relevant. She shares that “implementation science bridges that gap” in access to resources “to deliver mental health care to the next generation of the world's youth.”

Dr. Derosiers’s impactful work in global mental health projects spans across multiple countries and communities. In rural Sierra Leone, she led a culturally adapted pilot of an evidence-based home visiting program for families with young children, addressing caregiver mental health, reducing household violence, and strengthening bonds between caregivers and children. Her team worked with community health workers to design and deliver the intervention, ensuring strategies were rooted in local realities. Dr. Derosiers recalls, “one experience that made me feel like my research was making a difference was watching a video of a family in rural Sierra Leone playing with a toy that they had made from household items as part of an early childhood intervention that they participated in. The mother’s face radiated with joy as she talked about playing with her young children and making the toy together.”

In Kenya, her team is currently developing ways to integrate youth-centered mental health interventions into HIV care. By training peers, applying user-centered design, and leveraging mobile supervision models, the project aims to improve both mental health outcomes and HIV treatment adherence for young people living with HIV. 

Dr. Derosiers is particularly excited about her NIMH-funded project in Colombia, which aims to test a digital platform designed to promote mental health and prevent suicidal thoughts and behaviors among adolescents in Bogotá, Colombia. Through participatory design, adolescents are directly involved in co-designing the platform. She notes, “I really enjoy working as a team and innovating together, and applying design thinking principles to improve engagement with digital solutions is honestly a lot of fun”. 

Looking ahead, she sees both immense opportunity and important ethical responsibility in using AI to address the global mental health treatment gap, especially among underserved and hard-to-reach populations. As Dr. Desorsiers mentions, “we are just starting to unlock the potential of AI to help close gaps in mental health services worldwide.”

For the next generation of global mental health researchers, her advice is grounded in the basics of implementation science: always consider questions of scalability and sustainability. As she notes that “in the current climate, remaining flexible and nimble is the name of the game”.