Years of mental health work led to one stubborn question: why does the same programme turn out so differently from one place to the next?

I'm a psychologist by training, and before I became a researcher I worked the ground floor of this field: as a school psychologist, in my own private practice, as a corporate mental health lead, and as a consultant helping Estonian organisations build healthier workplaces. That mix is the whole reason I ended up here. It is where I first noticed the gap between a good idea on paper and what actually happens when it meets a real clinic, a real budget, and one overworked coordinator.

Behind every one of those gaps is a person who did or did not get help in time. That is what keeps the question from being academic, and it is what I have spent years chasing.

Eventually I wanted to understand why that gap is so stubborn, so I moved from running programmes to studying them. These days I'm a researcher at the Estonian-Swedish Mental Health and Suicidology Institute in Tallinn, where I'm also doing my PhD through Tallinn University. My dissertation sits inside a European project that runs the same depression-prevention programme in five countries at once (Albania, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, and Spain). One recipe, five kitchens, to see what happens when a single idea meets five very different realities. In Estonia I did not just study the programme, I built and ran it, from the rollout to the tracking tools I made myself, with a small crew of trainers and outreach partners handling the parts I could not. The lesson has been the same from Tallinn to Tirana: what a programme achieves depends less on how it is designed than on who runs it, and where. That question is what earned the Fulbright, and it's what I'm taking to Texas.

For most of my career I've watched how good plans survive contact with the real world, always from the outside. This year I'm making myself the experiment: moving my family into a system I don't yet understand, becoming my own test subject, the researcher about to find out in real time what a foreign place does to the person studying it. That is the story the letters tell.

Fulbright · Tallinn University · iFightDepression / EAAD · Horizon Europe