Worldwide

Citation

(2002), "Worldwide", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 15 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijhcqa.2002.06215eab.001

Worldwide

Worldwide

WHO country data show mental health resources fall short of needs

New World Health Organisation (WHO) data on the state of mental health resources in individual countries around the world demonstrate a large gap between what is needed and what’is available to take care of the burden of mental, neurological and behavioural disorders. According to the latest estimates, this represents 12.3 per cent of the total disease burden.

The new data, collected from government sources, have been published by WHO in Atlas: Country Profiles on Mental Health Resources. The findings reinforce the recommendations of the World Health Report 2001, that all countries, large and small, rich and poor, need to give a much higher priority to mental health and take urgent steps to enhance their mental health services.

A total of 40 per cent of countries have no mental health policies and 25 per cent have no legislation in the field of mental health. Many large countries, including China, Iran, Nigeria, Thailand and Turkey, have no specific legislation for mental health, though some are in the process of developing legislation. One of the surprising findings is that wealthy countries are not always rich in the quantity and quality of mental health resources. Of the countries reporting, about one-third spend less than 1 per cent of their federal health budget on mental health-related activities. Community care facilities have yet to be developed in about half of the countries in the African, Eastern Mediterranean and South-East Asia regions. In other regions, these facilities are absent in at least one-third of the countries. Of the total number of psychiatric beds in the world about 65 per cent are still in mental hospitals.

It is widely accepted that community care is more effective as well as more humane than inpatient stays in mental hospitals, but surprisingly, a large number of economically developed countries with extensive mental health infrastructure still have a large proportion of their psychiatric patient beds in mental hospitals. Ireland, Israel, The Netherlands and Spain have 80-95 per cent of the total psychiatric beds located in mental hospitals; the figure for France, Germany and Japan is 60-75 per cent and for Australia, Canada and USA is around 40 per cent.

The availability of mental health professionals in large areas of the world is extremely poor. More than 680 million people, the majority of whom are in Africa and Asia, have access to less than one psychiatrist per million population. This is the case in large countries with populations over 100 million, like Bangladesh and Nigeria.

Further information: Information about the Atlas project is available on the Internet at http://mh-atlas.ic.gc.ca/