Mental health: The challenges in India ,Asia and western society. Do you think these challenges impact the mental health treatment? Critically reflect on changing scenarios of Mental Health in India and worldwide..
Answers
The WHO has defined sustainable development goals and elaborated the impact of mental illnesses and suicide on them. The suicide rate in India in 2015 at 15.7/100,000 is higher than the regional average of 12.9 and the global average of 10.6.[14] Suicide is the leading cause of death among those aged 15–29 in India.[15] There remains a massive unaddressed need within the population.
The treatment gap, as measured by the absolute difference between the prevalence of mental illnesses and the treated proportion, has been found to be 76%–85% in less-developed countries.[16] One of the major reasons attributed to such a wide treatment gap is the problem of inadequate resources. In India, inadequacy exists in infrastructure as well as in human resources.[17] Despite improvements in various health indicators, India contributes disproportionately to the global burden of disease. Our health indicators compare unfavorably with other middle-income countries and India's regional neighbors. A large proportion of the population ends up impoverished because of high out-of-pocket health-care expenditures and suffers the adverse consequences of the poor quality of care.[18] Task-shifting to nonspecialist community health workers has been recommended as an effective strategy for delivery of efficacious treatments in low-resource settings.[19] Given the dire shortage in numbers of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, and social workers; piggy-backing on primary care systems and employing innovative force-multipliers are future courses of action.