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The Global Health Experiential Fellowship (GHEF) is a 5 week global health experience in Buyende District, Eastern Uganda. While integrating both fieldwork and research during this 5 week period, GHEF also emphasizes equitable global health practice through collaboration, mutual respect and community partnership.
During my time as a fellow, I got to experience more than just research, I was introduced to the public health sector in my country, Uganda which immediately sparked enthusiasm to learn and contribute to public health research in the future. Additionally, having the opportunity to integrate into the community through living and interacting with them opened my eyes to the differences in culture in Uganda which I was not exposed to growing up from the capital city, Kampala.
Participating in this fellowship, gave me the opportunity of engaging in qualitative research concerning depression stigma in Buyende District, Uganda. Depression in rural communities in Uganda is not a topic that is easy to explain nor understand. This was mostly due to the fact that the term "depression" does not has a direct translation in many languages in Uganda. Therefore while carrying out this research, amongst the limitations we experienced was the inability for participants to understand the term depression and thus fail to distinguish between psychological psychosis and depression.
Given that this project was primarily qualitative research, we collected data through questionnaires and interviews with 25 participants. While also moving between towns in Buyende District, we concluded that depression in these communities is a highly sensitive topic, and thus stigmatized, primarily due to the inability of individuals to recognize depression and therefore address it.