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Why mental health service delivery needs to align alongside mainstream medical services

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journal contribution
submitted on 2023-12-06, 11:53 and posted on 2023-12-07, 08:06 authored by Javed Latoo, Minal Mistry, Ovais Wadoo, Sheikh Mohammed Shariful Islam, Farida Jan, Yousaf Iqbal, Tom Howseman, David Riley, Daljit Sura, Majid Alabdulla

There is significant individual human suffering and economic burden because of untreated mental health and substance use disorders. There is high psychiatric morbidity in primary and secondary medical care. At least one-fifth of patients attending primary care services in western countries pertain to mental health and one-third of patients attending general hospitals have a comorbid mental disorder. Patients with mental disorders have lower life expectancy than the general population due to various medical conditions and reduced access to physical healthcare. There is a suicide every 40 seconds and the vast majority of those who die by suicide have a diagnosable mental disorder. Despite this, most countries spend less than 2% of their health budgets on mental health. Effective treatments exist for mental disorders, however underfunding, poor integration of services, lack of trained health care professionals and stigma often prevent access to effective treatments. Stigma is a significant barrier to seeking help and receiving treatment. Geographical separation of mental health services from general hospital settings may be perpetuating the stigma of mental illness among the population. In this article, we review the key reasons why mental health services globally need to align with mainstream healthcare services and the longstanding reasons that necessitate the need to make mental health a public health priority.

Other Information

Published in: Asian Journal of Psychiatry
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajp.2022.103053

Funding

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication Year

  • 2022

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Hamad Medical Corporation
  • Rumailah Hospital - HMC
  • Qatar University
  • Qatar University Health - QU
  • College of Medicine - QU HEALTH