STAND-Indonesia

Sustainable Treatment of Anxiety and Depression in Indonesia.

STAND-Indonesia aims to improve individual and population heallth outcomes in Indonesia by boosting equitable access to sustainable, evidence-based treatments for depression and anxiety.

The programme is funded by NIHR Global Health Research. It builds on strong partnerships between the Universities of Manchester and Indonesia, which have been developed over eight years.

STAND-Indonesia is supported by the Universitas Indonesia, National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), and the Directors of Mental Health and Primary Care in Indonesia.

On this page:

Programme background
Our activities
News and events
Our team
Contact us

Programme background

The total proportion of people living with common mental health disorders is rising.

These disorders have a significant impact on patient and population health, and challenge sustainable development in low-to-middle income countries (LMIC).

Fourteen million people live with depression and anxiety in Indonesia, placing it in the top two countries for prevalence in the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) South-East Asia region.

Effective psychological interventions are available for depression and anxiety, but stronger evidence on how to maximise the effect and sustainability of these interventions is needed.

STAND-Indonesia focuses on adults (18+) in Indonesia, with potential application in other LMICs.

Our aims

Adopt an inclusive and proactive approach when distributing resources with high stakeholder participation.
Deliver protocols that support high-quality service delivery, sustainable workforce capacity and treatment resources.
Quantify costs and complete a budget impact analysis to optimise scalability and sustainability.
Establish a health services training hub and strengthen mental health advocacy in Indonesia.
Develop culturally acceptable community engagement and involvement (CEI) guidelines.
Produce a new evidence-based framework to accompany advancing knowledge.

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Our activities

We directly address two research priorities identified through collaboration with local Indonesian community groups.

Our four-year programme comprises five work packages (WPs) and two cross-cutting themes (CCTs). Publications will be available in The University of Manchester’s Research Explorer and updated on an annual basis.

Information on activities in Indonesia can be found on the Indonesian project website.

Work packages

1: Health information and data gathering

Months 0-28 (August 2022 to December 2024)

Aims to pilot a new household survey to understand the distribution, determinants and socio-economic consequences of depression and anxiety in Indonesia and area-level influences on service supply.

2: Health product and supportive technology development

Months 4-15 (December 2022 to November 2023)

Aims to qualitatively explore the different contexts into which psychological interventions may be introduced in Indonesia and culturally-adapt, with Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) representatives, a low intensity psychological intervention for Indonesian use.

3: Service support and workforce resource

Months 16-22 (December 2023 to June 2024)

Aims to work in partnership with professional and community stakeholders to co-develop local implementation strategies to increase access to depression and anxiety treatments in Indonesia, and deliver and evaluate sustainable training to increase workforce capacity.

4: Accessible high-quality service delivery

Months 23-46 (July 2024 to June 2026)

Aims to use implementation science methodologies to evaluate the delivery, reach and impacts of a culturally-adapted, low-intensity psychological intervention for depression and anxiety in Indonesia and identify any outstanding barriers to its uptake, access and use.

5: Sustainability and financing

Months 34-46 (June 2025 to June 2026)

Aims to take a health economic perspective to identify priority regions for treatment roll-out and deliver a sustainability toolkit to support national scale-up.

Cross-cutting themes

These themes span our programme and are:

community engagement and partnership working (CCT1)
leadership and capacity building (CCT2)

The cross-cutting themes will help establish inter-sectoral networks and upskill clinical, academic and public collaborators to undertake high-quality service development and mental health research.

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