Joop de Jong is Professor of Cultural and International Psychiatry at VU University, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa, and staff member of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. He worked for years in Africa as public mental health expert, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and was the founder and director of the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) until its merger with HealthNet in 2004. Over the past decades he developed novel approaches to global mental health by integrating insights from public mental health, anthropology and epidemiology in community interventions in a variety of cultures, combining interventions with research and emphasizing the relation between psychosocial factors and socio-economic construction in post-war settings.