 Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to this press conference from the third morning of the 49th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum here in Snowy Davos. Thank you for joining us here in the room. Thank you for joining us, whether you're watching through Facebook, Twitter, or on our website. Thank you for being here. I'm particularly pleased to kick off this press conference because it covers a very important topic. A topic that's not an easy one. A topic that has admittedly been not always very strongly represented on the World Economic Forum's agenda. So we're particularly pleased to do better this year with a wonderful panel. The press conference is dedicated and has the title, It's Time to Act on Mental Health. To my immediate left, I'm joined by Alicia London. She's the CEO of United for Global Mental Health. To her left, we're joined by Professor Jeremy Forra, who is the Director of the Wellcome Trust, and last but definitely not least, we're joined by Paul Stoffels, who's the Chief Scientific Officer of Johnson & Johnson. Thank you very much. Without further ado, Alicia, we say in the title for this press conference, It's Time to Act. You obviously feel very strongly and work quite intensely on that topic. Share your perspective with us. Share your perspective with the audience on why you think it's time to act. Absolutely, and thank you for having me here. It definitely is time for the world to act on mental health. Mental health conditions have a significant impact on people's lives, on businesses, on economies all around the world. And we're really facing an unprecedented challenge when it comes to mental health. Particularly in the light of this fourth industrial revolution, the challenges and the opportunities that this is bringing are great. And mental health is definitely one of those challenges. The world currently isn't equipped to handle the rise in mental health conditions as it currently is, and that's only expected to increase. So by 2030, depression is expected to be the number one health condition. There's expected to cost the global economy about $16 trillion a year between 2010 and 2030. We face serious issues of stigma, discrimination, and human rights abuses. And the vast majority of people have access to no treatment when they do need it. The majority of which who are in lower middle income countries were about 75% of the conditions occur. What we believe is that we need to see a world where everybody, everywhere has someone that they can turn to when their mental health needs support, like I did. So about six years ago, I suffered a trauma. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and severe depression and suffered regularly with suicidal thoughts. But with the support and having friends, family, colleagues, medical attention, I was able to recover. And so there is a story of hope in this. It is possible to recover, and we need to see a world where that's possible for everyone. But for too long, mental health has, as you say, been overlooked and really significantly underfunded. This is why we established United for Global Mental Health to help galvanize this movement that so many are a part of. And I'm particularly delighted that the World Economic Forum has put it on the agenda, high on the agenda, at this year's Davos. So the question of what does this action need to look like? It's time to act. We know that. We know that this is a serious issue. Businesses have a front and leading role to play, both inside their organization and also within the communities and economies that they operate within. Governments need to have national plans and make sure they're implemented within the human rights kind of context. And make sure we recover everything from promotion, right through to treatment and recovery. Funding is a particularly important issue as well. So currently on average, governments spend only around 2% of their national health budgets on mental health. And it's been acknowledged that this has to raise to at least 5% in low-middle-income countries and at least 10% in high-income countries. Global aid as well needs to step into this area in a much more significant way In 2015, at last count, global aid on mental health was around 135 million total a year to all countries. This has to increase to at least a billion a year by 2023 to find the minimum standards of provision all over the world. But particularly in this year, we're focusing on humanitarian settings. And most importantly, and this is a really important point to those like myself who have suffered and making sure we get this right, we need to make sure that those who have personal experience of mental health conditions are part of the solution, that their voices are heard, that they're part of the solutions, right through to designing, right through to implementing them as well. So we're here at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This is kicking off this year where this message of its time to act is coming through. And there's a couple of things happening here today and across the week. So we have a panel that's happening at four o'clock this afternoon, which will be fantastic. Their friendship bench is an intervention from Zimbabwe, which we're showcasing here, a simple, low cost effective intervention where grandmothers are trained to sit on benches and provide talking therapies. It's been found to reduce depressive symptoms by around 90%. We need more solutions like this scaled around the world. And members of the World Economic Forum can come and sit on the bench and have a chat with the founder, Dix and Chavanda from Zimbabwe, across the week. And we're asking leaders, particularly the business community, to take a lead in this and think about what their commitments will be right across 2019. The year ahead is to close is the momentum is growing. So we have this great kickoff to the year here. Next week in South Africa, advocates with experts and lived experience from all around the world are joining in South Africa to build a new global campaign. We're looking forward to launching that at the World Health Assembly in May alongside health ministers. We follow through to the UN General Assembly in September where we're hoping that leaders from business and politics will step up with the commitments that they're bringing to the table. And the Dutch are hosting the second annual Global Ministerial Summit in October on mental health, just ahead of World Mental Health Day. So it's a big year for mental health. It is time to act. We need leaders to step up. I'm really delighted to be here with two who are really leading the way within their organizations and also around the world. We look forward to hearing from them in a minute. I think the main message here is we need to see a world where everybody everywhere has someone they can turn to when their mental health needs support. The World Economic Forum is a really unique place for particularly business leaders to come alongside public sector, make these commitments. And we're really looking forward to see what commitments will be made and return in Davos next year to hold them to account. Yeah. Thank you very much, Alicia. You mentioned the friendship bench and Jeremy, my sources, tell me you sat on that bench yesterday with Dr. Tedros from the Director General of the World Health Organization. Would you be able to share with us what you discussed with him while sitting on that bench? I'm afraid it was completely secret. Sorry. Well, in that case, thank you very much. No, please, go ahead. It's a brilliant invention from Dixon, from Zimbabwe. And as Alicia said, it's a very low cost but very effective. Now, neither Tedros or I are grandparents, but everybody can use it. And it is being copied around the world as a mechanism for reaching out and actually really for communicating and I think for helping to break down stigma. And I think where we are in mental health, I mean, Alicia's very beautifully talked about it, but the truth is it affects everybody. Everybody listening around the world today or certainly the four of us on this will all have been affected by somehow, either directly ourselves or by friends and family that we know. There is almost nobody who hasn't been in some way affected by this. And yet, interestingly, it's never had one of those sort of coming together of a broad coalition of people that have come together. Science, communities, innovators, industry, governments, world agencies, world health. There's never been that push around this and the field from a researcher's perspective is very fragmented. Psychiatry is often different to neurology, is different to basic science. There's a very good analogy, I think, with cancer, which was also in quite a bad place 20, 30, 40 years ago. And yet, that community was brought together. If you're a basic scientist working on cancer, if you're delivering care, if you're looking after people at the end of their life, you talk to your friends and family with pride that you're working in cancer. Doesn't matter that you're looking at cell biology or end-of-life care, your pride is in what you work on. And we don't have that within the mental health community and that's something I think we hope that we can bring to this broad coalition and movement and also learning lessons from the way the HIV community really pushed that agenda forward and resulted in phenomenal breakthroughs in the care of people and families and treatment. So I think unless you can bring that sort of group together and this is why places, the World Economic Forum has got such a critical role in this because it's one of the few forum which brings together industry, businesses, not just the pharma sector but beyond that, philanthropy, community movement and governments and I think that's the sort of group you need to bring together. On our side from welcome, we're a research-based organization, we work in science and innovation and we work in society and after a lot of work, it's a real pleasure to announce today that we are going to commit to an additional 200 million pounds, $260 million over the next few years to bringing together this sort of partnership of science, innovators, society, community-led groups, patient groups, industry working in partnership with friends and colleagues like Paul at Johnson & Johnson and others to try and really push this agenda forward. The World Health Organization is getting behind this, the UN Secretary General is getting behind this and I think for the World Economic Forum, we've got to appreciate this is a health issue which is very important to many of us. It's also a huge economic issue. Workplace is changing, the workplace environment is changing and if companies want to attract the best talents and retain it, we all have to produce an environment which is conducive to all of our mental health and our well-being because ultimately that will also make us more productive. So it's great to be here, it's great to be able to announce that welcome will be putting an additional $260 million into this and we really look forward to working with Alicia and with Paul as on so many issues to push this forward. Thank you, Jeremy. Paul, Jeremy already said your sector has a role to play here. Share with us your perspective on the topic and what do you think needs to happen in this time that would this need to act? Well, it's as John and Jeremy was saying, it's a neglected field in medical, in social. The care is a lot of stigma. That's where it is difficult to attract people, to train as psychiatrists, to train as nurses, to healthcare workers, community healthcare workers. It's a topic which is a very challenging one but at the same time a very important one and everyone in the world as a brother, a sister or a family member who has been affected with it, whether it's depression, whether it's schizophrenia and even worse, suicide. So it's all resulting of mental health issues. And so I think it's very important that jointly we promote the mental health, first of all expand mental health services, promote mental health as a medical field where there is a lot of progression possible and we have to reduce especially the premature mortality which is happening all over the world in youngsters especially. For us it goes back to the years of Dr. Janssen, the founder of a pharmaceutical group. Late in late fifties was one of the first to discover the new type of medicines like Haldol, later Risperdal and we learned that from pills to long actings we could do a lot. And over the last few years we have been working on progressing medicines which now can be administered once every month once every third month in schizophrenia and we are working on ones every six months. So that means that that application of new therapies in that field could become much more practical on the global scale. We also did that in depression we are working on new mechanisms. The science is now evolving that new targets for depression are moving forward in many of the pharmaceutical companies. So there is innovation going on there is more practical innovation. One of the things I want to highlight is that three monthly type of injection when you use a medicine orally and people are not compliant which typically is very difficult in mental health and especially schizophrenia the relapse rate after two months is very high. When you have a long acting injectable time to relapse after you lost injection can go up to one year. And that's where the public health application of new types of administration could really help people in large in countries. It helps a lot in the U.S. in Europe where we have seen the benefit of that. But now we also have started that in Rwanda and unfortunately Minister Kashumba from Rwanda couldn't be here this morning because she was here to explain what we were doing on global public health together with them in Rwanda. And I must say a lot of admiration for what Rwanda has done because with the genocide Rwanda has had a very serious mental health issue with the large part of the population and the government is tackling it head on with a big action in the country. First of all in collaboration with NGOs but with support of us there was a mental health survey in the whole of Rwanda is measuring what is the problem. Second there was a very large training program set up first digital for community healthcare workers they trained senior trainers to do that and today they trained 60,000 community healthcare workers were taught about what to do in case of mental health and connecting with the community healthcare centers in order to make people aware but also bring additional help in and refer people for treatment. And then third we are looking together with Rwandese government and that's like an experiment is can we apply long-acting injectables in the Rwandese environment and I'm happy to report that we are running that study in collaboration with Hospital in Endera and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda where last month we dozed the first few patients now with long-acting and that will learn us on how we can bring schizophrenia treatment to a very large population in resource limiting settings because you don't need that much infrastructure in order to do that. So mental health is part of a history and we are committed to continue to do basic research, applied research but also global expansion and making sure that people can benefit from this critical therapies. Thank you Paul. Thank you. I would be missed not to point out that Professor Morali Duraswamy tries to hide here in the audience he's one of the world's leading authorities in that field as well and if you're watching online you might have seen his recent Instagram stories with us so welcome sir, thank you for being here. Alicia, there's about 1600 business leaders here. They're getting bombarded by messages of you need to pay attention to the loss of biodiversity you need to pay attention to cyber security and all these things. How aware are they of the extent of the problem we're facing as a society with mental health? It's a great question. It's something that we've spoken to quite a lot of business leaders about across this week. We're finding a lot of business leaders are coming to sit on the bench and have a conversation and what we're seeing is this is really coming from a personal perspective from a lot of them as well because this as Jeremy says does impact all of us in some way but they're looking to understand what it is they can do within their organizations to take this more seriously. So I think it's fair to say there's definitely a strong interest there which is fantastic and that really comes from the place that our employees are such a fundamental part of our business and their health and well-being is being challenged at the moment. So there's a desire there. I think there's certainly an elite and they need to do a lot more and so I'm really excited to see the work that the World Economic Forum and Welcome and the WHO will be doing around employer guidelines to understand those and have more business leaders move from interest and into what am I actually doing about it? I think we'll see a little bit more about that from HSBC global CEO John Flint this afternoon in the panel which will be fantastic and Kaiser Permanente as well. So it's definitely there and again really thrilled that the World Economic Forum has provided the space for this conversation to happen and convene this conversation to bring these leaders together. Thank you Alicia. Jeremy you mentioned an incredible number of 260 million US dollars. Can you talk a little bit about what this money will be used for or is that too early at this point? I mean yeah in broad terms I mean we are a research organization so we think our contribution is to stimulate and catalyze that area. It is fascinating to watch how these things happen. I think you've got to offer hope. If you want to bring people in whether it's communities to engage in it or it's young scientists, clinicians, psychiatrists, nurses, et cetera you've got to offer that they can go places in their careers as well as in their research endeavor and you know we saw this in HIV it was in an awful position in the mid 80s when it first started then lots of people got into it because there were opportunities that people could see and I think this area of mental health has just not had that excitement it's not had that stimulus and you know I think that's something that we can bring. We will focus on young people's mental health. It's not that we don't think mental health issues among seniors isn't very important but we appreciate there's many others working in that space. We think our focus is going to be on young people's mental health, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia as Paul mentioned and try and stimulate that next generation of leaders that can come in and really change the space. And I think you can, we've seen that in cancer, we've seen it in HIV and I think you can really push an area forward. Thank you Jeremy and let me put one more question both to you Paul and Alicia. Alicia you mentioned the importance of also what organizations are doing within their space what they are doing for employees. Maybe you can give some examples what do you think some companies are already doing that are great or what should be done? It's front and center in our company globally that people have to know that they can get to trusted people that they can get to the medical services and that they helped with the challenges of depression and work-life balance and what is all following out of that. So we have a very well-established medical system in the world which is fully aware and is very much focused on that matter in the workspace. And of course it's not just the workspace with the workspace you also reach all the families around that. If you have your people being comfortable then the whole surrounding if you have 150,000 people in J&J we probably reach 400, 500,000 to that system which is a good start in the world. And if every industry can do that every company that you reach a massive number of people in the world. There are some great organizations around the world that are helping organizations and to think through what this can be done. City Mental Health Alliance is one mind at work. So for businesses that are interested in what they could do I would definitely encourage to speak to organizations and alliances like that who can really help them think through this and it's a really strong way. Key elements I know that are discussed. One leadership is really important. This has to be at the CEO level and as you see CEOs stepping out again the Kaiser Permanente, the John Flints as you see more and more of that happening that provides them a context for a company to really take this seriously and for staff to feel this is something they can talk about. So leadership, organizations like PricewaterhouseCoopers have run stigma campaigns throughout their organizations as well which is helping to address that and the provision of care training up of employees in Mental Health First Aid. No extension is looking to have 20% of all their staff trained up I think by 2020 best to check that with them. But that training up of employees to provide that peer at a manager level but also at a peer to peer level is really important as well. One last example which I really like the Royal Foundation of the Duke Inductress of Cambridge and the Duke Inductress of Sussex in England have developed through their Heads Together campaign Mental Health at Work and it brings together resources for organizations, businesses across the country that they can access to help know how to do this within the side of their organization. It's a really good example of seeing what's work and providing those practical tools for employers that want to know how to do this. Thank you, thank you. Mindful of the time, I'd like to open the floor for question and answer. We have a question from the lady in the back, please. Sophie Edwards from DevEx. You mentioned humanitarian settings and the focus of my publication is all developing countries. So it'd be great to hear a bit more about what needs to be done there, what are the special challenges, what you would like to see. And Jeremy, in terms of the fantastic funding you've announced, what sort of portion of that is going to focus on young people in developing countries? So I don't, firstly, I don't think there is any true global health without addressing the issue of global mental health. And in these areas of this extra funding from Welcome, that funding is global from the start. There is, and of course with my own background and that of Welcome's lower middle income country, however you wish to define that is going to be critically the central part of that. And yeah, the funding will be global and addressing the issues you describe, including in the humanitarian areas that you talk about. In humanitarian settings, mental health is a serious concern. We are seeing humanitarian agencies really acknowledge this and work on this. And it will be a focus of the ministerial, second ministerial summit that will be happening in the Netherlands in October this year, given its importance. There are many issues to address within it. I think the first is funding. It is an area that hasn't been funded. And that global funding we see in other areas of health as we should in the billions levels. It's not there in mental health. So increasing funding in all development settings, including humanitarian settings, at least to that billion a year, global funders really need to step into this space. And there's an opportunity to do that this year and increasingly don't support to doing that. Coordination and integration into existing services. This isn't about having mental health services over here, but it's about integrating into the services that already exist and providing that at a quality level of mental health support, skilling up workers and ensuring coordination, particularly in humanitarian settings where that's so crucial. Finally, I would also say there's humanitarian settings and then the transition from times of crisis into development and sustainability and how can mental health funding that is focused in that area help to make that transition? Because mental health conditions don't just happen in that time of crisis, they persist or develop over time. So making sure that that continued support is there for people who need it. Thank you very much. Do we have any more questions from the audience? I think we answered all. Then my last agenda point would be to point out my colleague Peter Varnum in the audience who's been behind this effort to put mental health on the forum's agenda and is also helping the forum as an organization itself to deal better with the challenges of mental health. So shout out to you, Peter, for putting so much work in this. Thank you. At this point, thank you very much for being here. Thank you for watching. Thank you to the panelists. And I liked very much Alicia's idea to come back next year and see what we have achieved and hold ourselves to account as an institution but also as a community on these matters. Thank you very much. Thank you.