Community mental health, seen from the other side of the Atlantic.

From August 2026 through May 2027, I'm a Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Social Work, there with my family for the year, working alongside faculty who study community-based social work practice, and watching, up close, how America cares for its people's mental health.

My research back home is built on a European model: five countries running the same programme under one shared EU framework, which makes it easy to see how much local context shapes what actually happens on the ground. Austin is a chance to run that same question against a completely different system: different funding logic, different training pipelines, a different relationship between community organisations and the state. I'm not here to declare a winner. I'm here to figure out what each side is quietly getting right that the other isn't, and whether any of it actually transfers.

Practically, that means sitting in on the work UT Austin's social work researchers are doing, comparing it against what I've seen across the COMBINA countries, and writing about the gap between the two, in the dissertation, and less formally, in the letters below.