Ohemaa Poku is Changing the Future of Mental Health
One of our newest brigadiers, Ohemaa Poku, is changing the Future of Mental Health
Hear ye, hear ye! GPB has its very first GPB Correspondent. That’s right (snap!). She is Godsdelight Agu, a writer, storyteller, and mental health advocate from Lagos, Nigeria. She has been on a quest to get to know more about our Global Play Brigadiers. Her discoveries? The genius, heartfelt, and artful stories of Brigadier Ohemaa Poku (USA). The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Assistant Professor Ohemaa Poku, PhD, MPH, MSW, grew up at the intersection of three worlds: the United States, the Caribbean, and Ghana.
Ohemaa shared with me that throughout her childhood, mental health simply wasn’t something people talked about. As she spoke, I could hear the weight of the cultural silence she grew up around. Silence in the home, among friends, and even among relatives who were doctors and nurses. What moved me was that what has come to be her life’s work didn’t come from academic curiosity; it came from personal absence, and that gap stayed with her. It made her wonder: "If we don’t talk about this, how many people are suffering in the shadows?"
Instead of turning away, she leaned in. She chose a path that many people in her communities didn’t even have a language for yet. And she wanted to serve African and immigrant populations, those who carry not just the burden of illness, but the burden of cultural expectations, migration stress, and stigma.
As she shared the story of her journey, from her role as Assistant Professor of Global Mental Health at Columbia University, to teaching the next generation of clinicians, to her research with adolescents, I realized how deeply personal all of this is for her. Teaching isn’t a job; it’s her way of giving others the tools she wished her own community had while growing up. And so not surprisingly, one of the most rewarding parts of her job is “watching people grow into the professionals our communities need.”
But the part of our conversation that surprised me most was when she began talking about play. For years, she worked in traditional research and clinical spaces, including a mentorship with One Mind. But joining the Global Play Brigade (GPB) shifted something. She described GPB like a breath of fresh air; a space where psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists come together not just to talk about mental health but to humanize it.
Play, she believes, does what lectures and charts often cannot do. It lowers defenses. It invites connection. It turns discomfort into courage. And in communities where stigma runs deep, play can open doors that therapy alone struggles to unlock. By the end of our conversation, I wasn’t thinking about her credentials. I was thinking about the young people she studies, the immigrant families she advocates for, and the future professionals she trains. I was thinking about how much it matters that someone like her exists in these spaces.
Ohemaa isn’t just researching mental health; she’s rewriting who gets to talk about it, who gets to access it, and what it looks like when culture, compassion, and play meet. She does this through her work as an Assistant Professor of Global Mental Health (in Psychiatry) and Director of Education and Training Initiatives for the Columbia-WHO Center for Global Mental Health at Columbia University, where she shapes the minds of her students, who in turn become future mental health professionals.
She believes play can help us change the conversation. After listening to her story, I believe Ohemaa is right.
