Global momentum for mental health

'There can be no health without mental health’ is a phrase often used by the World Health Organization (WHO) to express how vital mental health is in ensuring healthy, functioning individuals and effective communities.

Despite this warning, the provision of adequate services to address mental health issues, especially in developing nations, is often overlooked.

During the past few months The University of Melbourne has been helping to address this imbalance, by becoming the first University to head the Secretariat of the Movement for Global Mental Health (CIMH).

The CIMH at the University was selected by peer review to head the Global Movement – made up of more than 80 universities, organisations and institutions throughout the world dedicated to scaling up mental health services and raising awareness of the huge global need – over the next three years.

Head of the CIMH, Professor Harry Minas, said despite WHO estimates that around five per cent of any population suffers from prolonged and serious mental health illness the desperate need for health systems to adequately provide treatment and care for mental illness and improve their nation’s mental health has been largely ignored.

“The high prevalence of mental disorders and loss of life from suicide around the world is staggering. For example, approximately 300,000 people commit suicide in Asia each year and the life expectancy of people with schizophrenia is 15-20 years less than the general population,” Professor Minas says.

“Mental health issues are also the cause of massive losses in economic productivity as well as abject poverty and misery for so many people with mental disorders – most of whom have no access to treatment and care in low and middle-income countries.”

Former WHO adviser John Mahoney is hopeful that the movement can make some real changes during the next three years.

“There is real momentum growing in support of scaling up mental health services around the world. The recent UN General Assembly statement on global health and foreign policy highlights mental health as a major area of importance. The issue is slowly making its way into the spotlight – exactly where it needs to be,” he says.

The movement’s major activities over the next year include a Global Mental Health Summit in Cape Town in October and publication of the second Lancet Series on Global Mental Health.

Despite the awe-inspiring scale of the global mental health problem, according to a Call for Action paper published by the Global Movement for Mental Health, the scaling up of evidence-based treatment packages for people with mental disorders will add around $2 per capita per year to the health budget of low income countries, and $3-4 per capita per year in middle income countries.

According to Professor Minas, provision of basic mental health services even in low-income countries is easily affordable.

“Ignoring population mental health, ignores basic human rights, contributes to poverty and limits the ability of countries to achieve other development objectives, including the Millennium Development Goals,” he says.

“The progress that is being made in global mental health has to be supported by high quality research and can be accelerated by active collaboration. Mental health must be a key component of Australia’s international development agenda.”

For more information about the Movement for Global Mental Health go to:
http://www.globalmentalhealth.org/

For more information about the Centre for International Mental Health go to:
http://www.cimh.unimelb.edu.au