Mental illness rarely features in high-profile talks about global health, possibly because of a lingering taboo or the misguided perception that it is not a cause for concern in poor countries.
World Mental Health Day on October 10 was intended to set the record straight and raise awareness of mental illnesses that seriously affect the world’s poor.
Depression, for example, is particularly widespread in the developing world — of the 800,000 people who commit suicide every year, 86 per cent are in low- and middle-income countries, says the WHO.
For decades, efforts to improve health in developing countries focused on infectious diseases. Now that incidence of chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer are rising rapidly in the developing world, they are finally being taken as seriously as HIV and malaria.
But global opinion seems divided on whether to include mental health in the fight against non-communicable diseases in developing countries.
As a result, many important international initiatives to fight chronic diseases ignore mental health altogether.
The rationale behind this exclusion is that mental illness has not traditionally been included among non-communicable diseases.
Considering that mental and neurological disorders are among the risk factors for non-communicable disease, and that many psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia that affect millions of people in the developing world are non-communicable, this is a dangerously blinkered view.
Priya Shetty
The East African