School: Medicine
Department: Psychiatry
Dr. Dickens Akena is a psychiatrist and Senior Lecturer at the Department of psychiatry at the Makerere University College of Health Sciences in Kampala, Uganda. Dr. Akena completed his PhD (2013) and Post-Doctoral training (2016) from the University of Cape Town. Dr. Akena conducts his clinical duties at the Butabika National Referral Hospital for mental health.
His major contribution to research over the last 13 years has been in the field of psychometrics (scale development and validation) where he led the development and validation of two depression screening instruments for use among individuals with low level of literacy in Africa and been part of a team that validated a screening scale in persons with psychosis. The visual screening instrument has been modified to include a psycho-education component. www.avidi18.com. During the last 6 years, he has been part of research that is examining the burden of first episode psychosis in Uganda as well as collaborative efforts to study the genetics of psychosis in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia (the Neuro-GAP project).
He has led the study activities in Uganda including supervision of all aspects of the study including participant enrollment, assessment, data collection and cleaning, as well as collecting, storage and shipping of DNA samples. He also assembled a cohort of individuals with a first episode psychosis from this work. He embedded a psycho-education intervention in this cohort. He also conducted a number of systematic review, developed and taught these courses at Makerere, Mbarara University of Science and Technology and University of Kwazulu Natal in Durban, South Africa
Research and Publications
Social Media
- X: @_dkena