Professor Simone Honikman

Simone Honikman is the founding director of the award-winning Perinatal Mental Health Project, which has been running for 21 years at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Professor Honikman is currently an AfOx TORCH Visiting Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health, University of Oxford, as part of the Africa Oxford Visiting Fellowship Programme.

Simone is a medical doctor with a Master’s in Maternal and Child Health, both from UCT. She has clinical experience in obstetrics, gynaecology, paediatrics, psychiatry, and HIV medicine, and has worked in several resource-constrained contexts. She has designed maternal mental health services integrated within maternal and child health settings, both in health facilities and within community-based organizations. Simone has conducted research on developing and validating a mental health screening tool for pregnant women in South Africa. Additionally, she has worked on capacity-building interventions for frontline health and social service providers, focusing on empathic skills and staff psychological wellness. Her other research includes work on perinatal mental health and its intersections with domestic violence, food insecurity, suicidality, alcohol and substance use, service utilization, health economics, and health systems. She has also developed advocacy materials, policy and health guidelines for maternal mental health and led the writing of the WHO guide for perinatal mental health published in 2022. Simone has developed a wide range of capacity-building resources, including films, manuals, theatre-based training methods, a mobile application, provider self-care programs, and gamified participatory learning techniques.

In Oxford, Simone will work on a project that focuses on Perinatal Mental Health: complex intervention development and testing in India and Africa.