What is "basicneeds"

BasicNeeds is a global mental health organisation, which works with people with mental illness or epilepsy in the developing world to alleviate their poverty and help them secure their basic rights.

The organisation was established 2000, by Chris Underhill MBE, who had worked with mental health organisations in Africa for over 25 years and arrived on the continent in the early 1970s with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). BasicNeeds was a response to the lack of real mental health care in lower and middle income countries. Led by Chris Underhill, BasicNeeds developed a new approach called the Model for Mental Health and Development, to accommodate lack of national government action in this area of healthcare. BasicNeeds started its work in India in 2000 and quickly expanded to Sri Lanka later that year. Since its foundation until now the organisation has helped over 609,000 people with mental illness or epilepsy as well as their families and carers in India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Lao PDR, Vietnam, Nepal, China, Pakistan and South Sudan.