• Introduction
    PREMIUM

    Welcome to the PREMIUM Healthy Activity Program training course! Please note that in order to enroll in this course, you must have successfully completed the Counselling Relationship course first. Once you have done so, you will be emailed a password to access this course.

    This course is based on the Healthy Activity Program (HAP) manual. HAP is a brief psychological treatment, based on behavioural activation, for moderately severe to severe depression. The treatment was then evaluated in a large randomized controlled trial in India, where it was delivered by counsellors with no prior mental health experience in routine primary health care settings. The results were very positive and you can freely download the scientific publication in The Lancet and review the findings and recognize the large group of Indian and international scientists who have contributed to this effort. This online course was developed by Arpita Anand, Sona Dimidjian and Vikram Patel; additional contributions were made by Angela Leocata, Sydney Church, Luanna Fernandes, Ajay Kumar, Akila Kalsur, Ankita Khanna, Medha Upadhye and Dielle Dsouza. The authors of the manual are Arpita Anand, Neerja Chowdhary, Sona Dimidjian and Vikram Patel.

    The Healthy Activity Program is one of two treatments produced by the PREMIUM program; the other treatment is Counselling for Alcohol Problems. The goal of the PREMIUM program is to develop psychological treatments which can be scaled up in routine health care settings. The program is entirely funded by the Wellcome Trust, through a grant to Vikram Patel, and is implemented as a partnership between the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Sangath and the Government of Goa's Directorate of Health Services. This online version of the training that teaches how to deliver the treatment has been made possible through NextGenU.org and the Annenberg Physician Training Program in Addictive Disease.

    Logos for Wellcome, Sangath and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

    Enrol





    Forum Forum


    The Healthy Activity Program (HAP), a lay counsellor-delivered brief psychological treatment for severe depression, in primary care in India: a randomised controlled trial

    Lancet Article


    Contact Us

    About the course

    This course will teach learners skills to deliver this treatment to patients with moderately severe to severe depression, the various phases of the treatment, and how to teach patients strategies to solve their own problems. The online course is a summarized version of the HAP manual. All the course material, including the HAP manual, is available online for download.

    What you will learn in this course:

    • How to identify patients with depression 
    • Key concepts in counselling for depression 
    • Techniques of behavioural activation for treating depression 
    • Other strategies in dealing with problems which may be experienced by people with depression.

    There are 12 modules of online HAP study which include text content, 21 lectures, eight video demonstrations of role-plays, and a self-assessment test. The course provides a step-by-step guide for each treatment phase, and includes handouts used when delivering the HAP to patients. 

    You must complete the entire course, all the self-assessments achieving a minimum pass percentage, and the course evaluation to be able to obtain the course completion certificate.

    This course is only intended to give trainees a basic understanding of the treatment; upon completion of the training, trainees should ideally complete at least four supervised cases of depression, and supervision can be done in groups with peers who have also completed the training.

     

    Teachers