Focus on Mental Health

September 16, 2007 by News Editor

The Lancet has recently published a series of papers on global mental health. In the series the Lancet expresses a call to action for governments, donors, multilateral agencies and other mental health stakeholders to scale up the coverage of mental health services, especially in low and middle income countries.

Currently mental health services are severely under resourced. Almost a third of countries do not have a specified budget for public health and low income countries have serious shortages of trained mental health nurses and psychiatrists. Chad, Eritrea and Liberia have only one psychiatrist working in each country.

As a consequence, the human rights of millions of people living with mental disorders are violated: individuals are denied access to basic mental health care and treatment; they face inappropriate, forced admission or treatment in mental health facilities; abuse within psychiatric institutions; and stigma and discrimination outside institutions.

Whilst the resources needed to scale up core mental health services are relatively modest (US$2 per person per year in low income countries), improving the human rights of people living with mental disorders also requires the implementation of mental health and human rights legislation, monitoring to ensure that rights are being respected, and mental health care available at the community level for anyone who may need it.