Mental Health Care Gap Essay

Roughly three-quarters of the global disability burden are carried by low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) (WHO 2015); yet resource allocation towards mental health services has been relatively low. Only 15% to 24% of people with mental disorders receive treatment in poor income settings (WHO Fact Sheet 2017a). To revise this treatment gap and to ensure that people are able to “realize their potential, cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively, and contribute to their communities” (WHO 2013, p. 5), mental health must be given further priority on the global and national health agenda. The aim of this essay is to give reasoning for prioritizing mental health in LMIC.

The burden of mental health disorders such as depression,

Aiming to close the mental health treatment gap, by integrating mental health services into primary health care settings in LMICs (also known as “task-sharing”), the WHO is addressing one of the main reasons for this disparity – the fact that the majority of the available mental health services are situated in centralized health facilities, leaving people in rural and remote areas without diagnosis and treatment (Wainberg et al. 2017). However, the consortium of the Programme for Improving Mental Health Care (PRIME) (Lund et al. 2012) highlights the fact that there is currently insufficient proof on the impact and implementation process of interventions, such as mhGAP, in primary health care at the community level. The PRIME consortium aims to tackle this lack of evidence in five LMIC: Ethiopia, India, Nepal, South Africa, and

Both authors identified the lack of infrastructure, available facilities as well as workload, the limited knowledge about diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and the low number of specialized staff to train CHW and PHW as major barrier to the acceptability and feasibility of task-sharing (Abera et al. 2014; Mendenhall et al.