This book focuses on the ever-growing trend of integrating mental health care into primary care settings. With a global health perspective, this concise, practical book describes the treatment of common disorders such as depression and anxiety using a wellness-based approach. It focuses on how primary care providers and embedded mental health specialists can deliver transdisciplinary services in resource- challenged environments through the application of the wellness paradigm. The underlying goal of this book is to strengthen competence-based training through the explication of a personalized, holistic, wellness approach. The book also includes a preliminary evaluation from the experiences of trainees implementing the approach at primary care level. The book aims to shift beyond the rhetoric and theory of integrating mental health into primary health care to a focus on ‘policy to praxis’ dynamics and thinking pragmatically in such settings while remaining grounded within one’s scope of practice. It is an excellent basis for curricula and training programs for a variety of mental health professionals.

Kamilla V. Rawatlal is a Counselling Psychologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She has served as the Programme Manager, Practicum Programme Coordinator and External moderator on different professional psychology training programmes at higher education institutions. Her academic and research interests are focused on strengthening trainee clinicians’ capacity and competencies to work within diverse, resource constrained primary care contexts. She has also served on different professional bodies that include the Psychological Society of South Africa, (PsySSA), Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) and the South African Career Development Association (SACDA). Her first book title in 2023, titled Clinical Supervision in South Africa: Improving Practice with limited resources, was also published by Springer. In this second book, her research and academic work is synthesized to focus on integrating evidence based mental health interventions, in primary care based on the application of a wellness framework. The author acknowledges the influence of the work of her mentors in the field, Professor Inge Petersen, Director at the Centre for Rural Health, University of KwaZulu Natal  for her work on integrating mental health into primary health settings and Professor Tharina Guse, Head of Department, Psychology, at the University of Pretoria, for her pioneering work on Wellness and strengths-based approaches in Psychology training programmes.