A Public Health Approach To Mental Health

The mental, physical and social health of all the individuals are vital strands of life that are closely interwoven and deeply interdependent. As understanding of this mental and physical relationship grows, it becomes ever more apparent that mental health is crucial to the overall well-being of individuals, societies and countries.

In most parts of the world even today, unfortunately, mental health and mental disorders are not regarded with anything like the same significance as physical health. They instead, have been largely unnoticed or even neglected.

Partly the world as a result is poorly suffering from an increasing burden of mental disorders, and a widening treatment gap. Around 450 million people today are suffering from a mental or behavioral disorder, yet only a small minority of them receives even the most basic treatment. Most individuals, in the developing countries, with severe mental disorders are left to cope as best they can with their private burdens such as depression, schizophrenia, dementia, and substance dependence. Many people are globally victimized for their illness and become the targets of stigma and discrimination.

Further increases in the number of people suffering from mental disorder are likely in view of the ageing of the population, worsening social problems, and civil unrest. Mental disorders already represent four of the 10 leading causes of disability worldwide. This rising burden amounts to a huge cost in terms of human desolation, disability and economic loss. Mental and behavioral disorders are recently estimated to account for 12% of the global burden of disease, yet the mental health budgets of the majority of countries constitute less than 1% of their total health expenditures. The affiliation between disease burden and disease spending is visibly disproportionate. More than 40% of developed countries have no mental health policy and over 30% have no mental health Programme. Around more than 90% of developed countries even have no mental health policy that can include children and adolescents! Health plans also, frequently do not cover mental and behavioral disorders at the same level as other illnesses, creating significant economic difficulties for patients and their families. And so the suffering continues and the people and the difficulties grow.

This condition need not be so. The importance of mental and physical health has been recognized by World Health Organization since its origin, and is reflected by the definition of health in the World Health Organization Constitution as not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, but rather, a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being. In recent studies this definition has been given sharper focus by many huge advances in the biological and behavioral sciences. These in turn have broadened the understanding of mental and physical functioning, and of the profound relationship between mental, physical and social health. From this new understanding emerges new hope.

Today people know that most ailments, mental and physical, are influenced by a combination of psychological, biological, and social factors. Most of the people know that mental and behavioral disorders have a basis in the central nervous system or brain. People know that they affect of all ages in all countries, and that they cause suffering to families and communities as well as individuals. And people know that in most cases, they can be diagnosed and treated cost-effectively. From the sum of their understanding, people with mental or behavioral disorders today have new hope of living full and productive lives in their own communities.

• Matt Thompson
• 06/01/2009, 4:59 AM
• 0 Comments