Across most of the world the majority of people with mental health problems are living their lives without receiving any treatment or professional help, according to an article published in The Lancet.
Dr. Philip Wang, National Institute of Mental Health, Maryland, US, and team looked at information on 84,850 adults from low/middle-income and high-income countries – the information came from the WHO’s mental health surveys.
The proportion of ‘patients’ who received some kind of mental health service 12 months prior to being questioned varied from 18% in the USA to 2% in Nigeria. They found a close correlation between the percentage of people who had received (or not) care with how developed a country was – also on how much of a nation’s GDP was spent on health. For example, 11% of people with a mental disorder received some kind of attention in China, compared to 61% in Belgium. The researchers said it was not the seriousness of the disorder that influenced the figures, rather the wealth of a country and how much was spent on health as a percentage of its whole economy.
Even for those who were treated, the percentage who received follow-up care varied from 10% in Nigeria to 70% in Germany, and 95% in Italy. They also reported that those more likely to receive less or no treatment were male, married, of a lower-academic level, and either very young or very old.
“Alleviation of these unmet needs will require expansion and optimum allocation of treatment resources,” the authors wrote.
This information is an eye-opening global account of how the majority of people with mental illnesses are simply not treated, wrote Dr. Graham Thornicroft, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, UK, in an accompanying Comment. “Why do we invest so little in our mental health care? To what extent is the under-use of services due to most people with mental illness actively avoiding help? Why have we allowed this global and gross neglect to be denied for so long? Specific actions are needed now to redress this silent scandal,” wrote Thornicroft.
Written by: Christian Nordqvist