Children and Adolescents’ Mental Health in Iran’s Primary Care: Perspectives of General Practitioners, School Staff, and Help Seekers

Background Iran has well-established networks for primary care staffed by general practitioners who provide services to patients across the lifespan. Iran recently established collaborative care networks to build general practitioners’ capacity to provide adult mental health services. In an NIH-funded study, we are designing and evaluating a training program for general practitioners (GPs) to extend this collaboration to include services for children and adolescents. In the formative phase of this project, we conducted a qualitative study to obtain information relevant to the design of the training program.