Sean Mayberry

Founder and CEO StrongMinds

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sean Mayberry is Founder and CEO of StrongMinds, the nonprofit he started in 2013 to make depression treatment cheap enough and simple enough to scale across low-income countries. A former diplomat and social marketer, he built the organisation around group interpersonal psychotherapy delivered by trained lay community health workers rather than clinicians, on the argument that the binding constraint on mental health care in Africa is not evidence but cost and workforce. StrongMinds now reports having treated more than two million people for depression at about $10.55 per person, working across five African countries in partnership with national health and education ministries.

Career Highlights

• Founded StrongMinds in 2013; the organisation reports more than two million people treated for depression to date.
• Reports a cost of $10.55 to treat one person for depression, with around 74% of participants depression-free at the end of therapy and an estimated 8 million people benefiting indirectly.
• Scaled the programme across Uganda, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, working through partnerships with Ministries of Health and Education.
• Named to TIME’s inaugural TIME100 Health list of healthcare innovators.
• Received the Honorary Pardes Humanitarian Prize in Mental Health and the Humanitarian Award from the Group Foundation for Advancing Mental Health.
• Has served as a SOCAP Fellow, a Rainer Arnhold Fellow, a Cordes Foundation Fellow and a GLG Fellow.

Professional Journey

Mayberry began his career as a Foreign Service Officer with the US Department of State and spent time at Intel Corporation before moving into international development. He worked for Population Services International as Country Director in India and in the Congo, implementing HIV/AIDS and malaria programmes, and went on to serve as Chief Operating Officer of VisionSpring, which supplies eyeglasses to low-income populations, and then as Chief Executive Officer of FXB International, an anti-poverty organisation active in Africa. Across nearly a decade living and working in Africa he saw how completely mental health was absent from the health systems he was building programmes inside.

In 2013 he left the CEO role at FXB to found StrongMinds, taking as his starting point a Johns Hopkins randomised controlled trial that had found group interpersonal psychotherapy, delivered in Uganda by lay community health workers rather than psychiatrists, produced large reductions in depression. The bet was that this could be driven down in cost and run at national scale. StrongMinds began in Uganda and has since expanded into Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi.

The model has shifted over time from direct delivery toward embedding the therapy inside government systems, with StrongMinds now working through Ministries of Health and Education and running model districts alongside its own programmes. Its own reporting puts the cumulative total at more than two million people treated, the cost at $10.55 per person, and the proportion of participants depression-free at the end of therapy at roughly 74%. Mayberry has become a visible advocate for the case that mental health belongs in global health budgets, speaking at TEDx and EAGXNordics and writing for and being covered by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Forbes, The Guardian, the BBC and The New York Times. He was named to TIME’s first TIME100 Health list and has held fellowships with SOCAP, the Rainer Arnhold Fellows programme, the Cordes Foundation and GLG.

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Degree not specified in any first-party source.

Emory University

Degree not specified in any first-party source.