Medical Anthropology - Mental Health

Mental health is one of the most neglected fields of healthcare. There is so much suffering related to mental health all over the world, which is either not recognized or goes untreated because of lack of expertise or other resources. Although stress and distress have been important topics in medical anthropology, respectively mental health itself has not received sufficient attention in either   anthropology or public health. This issue has assumed international importance with the emergence of marked increases in psychiatric and behavioral problems, in tandem with exponentially increasing numbers of refugees worldwide and escalating disruption of social structure such as family and local communities. More over mental health problems and behavior problems are closely related to health problems of both infectious and chronic nature, therefore unraveling the basis of mental health and physical health risk, and thus the extension of such research to developing efficient treatment and preventative measures demands a combination of both biological and psychosocial approaches.
Preliminary results from the world’s largest survey on mental health indicates that mental health is widespread and untreated and that wealthy people with mental illness receive more and better treatment than poor people with severe mental illness. One to five percent of the population of most countries surveyed had serious mental illness according to the findings, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, and in most of the countries nine to seventeen percent of those interviewed had some episode of mental illness in the last year, whether serious or less severe.   Around the world it was found that mental illness causes as many days of work lost as any physical problems such as cancer, heart attack, or back pain. The level of role impairment that was found associated with serious mental disorders was staggering: more than a month in the past year when the respondents... [continues]

Read full essay