Jesus Emmanuel A. D. Sevilleja, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Mental Health in the Philippines, describes the mental health sector as both a scientific challenge and a human mission, emphasizing its role in promoting equity, empowerment, and human rights. His work focuses on generating evidence about the burden, risk factors, and outcomes of mental health conditions to guide policy, clinical guidelines, and interventions. Emmanuel’s dedication to mental health was deepened through direct interactions with people living with psychosocial, intellectual, and cognitive disabilities, where he witnessed the stigma, discrimination, and exclusion they face, highlighting the urgent need to transform both the science and culture of mental health care.
Motivated to drive change, Emmanuel completed the WHO QualityRights in Mental Health online, self-paced course, which covers six modules designed to challenge stigma and discrimination while promoting person-centered, rights-based approaches. He credits the course with reshaping his perspective on mental health, emphasizing human rights, dignity, and recovery-oriented practice. Emmanuel now integrates rights-based principles into study design, data collection, and interpretation, ensuring research empowers service users rather than treating them solely as subjects.
The course also reinforced the importance of involving people with lived experience as active co-creators in research, policy, and program design. Emmanuel plans to meaningfully engage service users and families so that their voices and preferences inform mental health outcomes. His commitment is reflected in his standing as the top learner among 141,000 global participants, with his experience mirrored by a broader evaluation showing a 22.78% overall improvement in attitudes toward people with mental health conditions after completing the course, with even higher gains in low- and middle-income countries.
Emmanuel highlights the course’s practical examples and case scenarios as particularly valuable, demonstrating how human rights can be applied in real-world settings to challenge stigma, reduce coercive practices, and foster service user participation. The course’s inclusive design, targeting health professionals, service users, families, and communities, underscores that mental health is a collective responsibility. The global evaluation also revealed a high completion rate of 54.17%, well above the typical range for online courses, confirming its effectiveness in driving systemic change.
Through his experience, Emmanuel has observed tangible improvements within his institution, including increased awareness, reduced stigma, and a shift toward rights-based, person-centered care. He strongly recommends the course for its practicality and impact, noting that it equips learners to become champions of change, transforming mental health systems toward inclusivity, equity, and empowerment.
