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Mental Health Resources in Developing Countries

Mental Health Resources Physical health is often the focus of healthcare advocacy groups, but mental health needs to be improved around the world just as much. While some still consider mental health a taboo subject, it is important to improve the lives and prospects of those in poverty. The violence and trauma that often go hand-in-hand with extreme poverty can cause mental health issues. Proper care is often lacking but organizations are stepping up to the challenge. There are several organizations providing mental health resources in developing countries.

The Africa Mental Health Research and Training Foundation (AMHRTF)

AMHRTF focuses on providing mental health services in developing countries like Kenya. The organization prioritizes community health, making it a point to educate and serve community members of all ages from children to the elderly. It puts special focus on pregnancy and postpartum mental healthcare and trauma-related mental health disorders. In addition, the organization employs professionals with a wide range of specialties in order to implement holistic care. AMHRTF aims to make mental healthcare in Kenya available and accessible.

Strong Minds

Strong Minds focuses on providing mental health services in developing countries throughout the African continent. Specifically, the organization works toward ending Africa’s depression epidemic and reaching the most vulnerable women with depression in sub-Saharan Africa. After conducting research on the most effective and cost-efficient ways to conduct programs, Strong Minds settled on a model of consistent group therapy for a period of 12 weeks that a trained community member led. Qualifying to receive training as a group leader does not require a high level of formal education beforehand and is therefore accessible to members of communities in extreme poverty. These groups are extremely effective at reducing the cases of depressive episodes and providing coping mechanisms.

The World Federation for Mental Health

The World Federation for Mental Health emerged in 1948 and has been active in several different areas of mental health services since. The organization’s focus is destigmatizing mental illness and advocating for international and national mental health policies for the underserved. The organization helps to organize mental health awareness activities and events around the world and educate the public on mental health conditions. It also aims to improve care, treatment and recovery of people with mental disorders.

Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry

The Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry initially provided mental health services in developing countries in Europe with a special focus on nations that were previously part of the USSR. The organization’s work has now spread to include other regions too. The organization advocates for mental health care as a human right and assists people with mental health disorders, intellectual disabilities and trauma-based disorders. Like Strong Minds, the Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry focuses on improving mental health options and services on a community level by working with local negative forms of mental illness management and helping to create more positive treatment options. The organization’s decentralized approach makes solutions more sustainable in the long term.

Center for Health and Human Development

Mental Health International, under the umbrella of the organization Center for Health and Human Development, helps to provide mental healthcare in El Salvador and other developing countries like Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization aims to destigmatize mental illness and form a network of NGOs to provide care to people with mental health disorders like depression and schizophrenia. Mental Health International also provides self-empowerment techniques along with training and classes for mental health caregivers.

All the above organizations work to improve and provide mental health resources in developing countries and create a world in which everyone in need has access to sufficient care.

– Che Jackson
Photo: Flickr

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Changing the Treatment of Global Mental Illness

Global Mental IllnessMental illness receives far less attention than it should. Even though the data collected on global mental illness is minimal, it proves that mental diseases impose a functional hindrance on a stark percentage of the population. When not at full mental health, an individual cannot cope with the stresses of life nor make a productive contribution to their community. Therefore, providing effective and accessible treatment for mental illness is essential around the world.

Each organization listed here offers unique strategies to combat global mental illness. They range from small organizations with a specific focus to large organizations that devote only a part of their resources to mental health. Despite the varying sizes and contribution of each one, the continued efforts and successes of all of them still give an often ignored problem some much-needed attention and alleviation.

Strong Minds

The Strong Minds organization has had a promising impact on mental health despite being such a new and small program. Unlike organizations that tackle global mental illness by placing their incumbents throughout the world to cover multiple issues, Strong Minds has reserved its programs to African women with depression.

While this seems like a narrow focus, Strong Minds insists that their program can still have a major impact. Their website points to the statistics that 100 million people in Africa suffer from depression and women suffer at twice the rate of men. Suffering from depression makes women less productive and can cause further issues with physical health over time, which can, in turn, have an impact on the children of the person suffering.

Strong Minds uses a cost-effective method known as Group Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT-G), which it can easily teach to local professionals. It consists of an initial 12-week talk therapy session. The women who complete these therapy groups also have the option to create their own Peer Therapy Groups to help other members of their community.

Using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to evaluate their patients’ depression after the program, the organization found the results to be better than initially expected. Of the women who graduated from the program “between 94-97 percent” reported reduced symptoms of depression, and a third remained depression-free after six to eight months. With this success, Strong Minds hopes to continue to expand its program through additional connections with other programs in order to reach more women overall.

The Carter Center

While former president Jimmy Carter’s organization allocates a significant section of its healthcare resources towards physical diseases, it also has a commitment to mental health. Jimmy Carter’s wife and the center’s co-founder, Rosalynn Carter, manages The Mental Health Care Task Force and The National Advisory Council as well as The Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. She also holds an annual symposium on mental health policies that gathers innovative thinkers in order to discuss and learn about a different topic each year.

Unlike an organization that creates mental health care programs or sends in doctors, The Carter Center focuses instead on spreading awareness and education about global mental illness. The task force partners itself with global health leaders in order to advocate for the need of such programs and to create policies that will alleviate mental illness. The fellowship has the task of reducing the stigma of mental illness by teaching journalists how to “more accurately and sensitively report information and influence peers and stakeholders to do the same”.

The Carter Center’s programs working in Liberia have had the most telling impact with the center and its partners training more than 240 mental health clinicians, some of whom have gone on to create programs of their own. It has also assisted Liberia’s Ministry of Health in the creation of a “five-year strategy and policy plan” to protect and promote the rights of mentally ill individuals.

The journalism fellowship has produced “more than 1,500 stories, documentaries and books”, which have garnered an Emmy, nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, and other awards. Many alumni have also reported a progress in the mental health policies at the local and state levels.

Doctors Without Borders

Founded in 1971, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) works to provide global healthcare in more than 70 countries to individuals who need it most in times of crisis. Natural disasters, epidemics, refugee migrations and conflicts all fall within the typical events that doctors in the MSF work to alleviate. Along with the typical injuries and illnesses following a crisis, MSF acknowledged the need to also treat mental illness as part of their emergency work in 1998.

This work remains a challenge for the organization due to the complexity of both managing psychiatric medications and providing long-term care in areas of conflict and disaster. Nevertheless, the organization held “229,000 individual and 53,300 group counseling sessions” in 2016, which were often performed by local counselors trained by MSF. These sessions treat a variety of symptoms from depression and anxiety to coping with the trauma that victims of disasters have endured.

Increased awareness efforts about the truth and the impact of global mental illness should influence more governments and non-profits to redirect their aims. However, more innovations will be needed in the coming years to make it cheaper and easier to provide mental health resources around the world. In the meantime, these organizations, as well as others, can only hope for and work towards the continued success of their programs.

– Elizabeth A. Frerking

Photo: Flickr