Dr Dickens Akena is a psychiatrist, Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the Makerere University College of Health Sciences in Kampala, Uganda. Dr Akena received his medical degree (2003) and Master of Medicine in psychiatry at Makerere University (2008), followed by a PhD in Psychiatry at University of Cape Town in South Africa (2013), and a post-doctoral fellowship in psychometrics (2016) at the UCT. Dr Akena is a practicing psychiatrist at the Butabika National Referral Hospital for mental health in Kampala, Uganda where he also trains and supervises Master of Medicine in psychiatry students.

Dr Akena’s research interest is in psychosis and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), particularly in persons with low literacy from populations that are historically disadvantaged (with low access to care). Dr Akena developed the very first visual scale for assessing depression among persons with low literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which is available freely on the internet (www.avidi18.com). Dr Akena has taken this research further to develop a number of multimedia materials comprised of text, audio and pictures for purposes of enhancing mental health literacy among persons with psychosis and common mental disorders.

In 2016, Dr Akena added genetics to his research portfolio and working together with colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dr Akena leads (Uganda PI) the largest case/ control study on psychosis in Uganda, consisting of 12,000 individuals, all who submitted saliva samples for genetic sequencing. The Ugandan cohort is combined with four other cohorts in SSA to form the Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Population (NeuroGAP) study. Embedded within the NeuroGAP study, is a sub-study that Dr Akena runs consisting of participants with first episode psychosis in which Dr Akena is actively developing an educational intervention focusing the materials on low-literacy individuals. More recently, with colleagues at Aga Khan University and the Broad Institute Dr Akena is co-leading (MPI) a study exploring the genetics of PTSD in both the Neuro GAP participants and a new collection with the Medical Research Council at Makerere University. The sample size for the PTSD study is 5000. Email: akenadickens@yahoo.co.uk