The global situation for people with mental illness - in developing and developed countries - is dire. Legislative and human rights protections are frequently lacking. Mental health budgets are inadequate. There are insufficient numbers of skilled policy makers, managers and clinicians. Communities are poorly informed about mental health and illness and not well organised for purposes of advoca...

A little over a year ago, The Lancet published a Series of fi ve articles on Global Mental Health that documented the current evidence for global mental health, with a focus on low-income and middle-income countries. The fi nal paper in the Series made a call to scale up evidence-based packages of services for people with mental disorders with a commitment to the protection of human rights. The...

Global mental health has emerged as an important specialty. It has drawn attention to the burden of mental illness and to the relative gap in mental health research and services around the world. Global mental health has raised the question of whether this gap is a developmental issue, a health issue, a human rights issue, or a combination of these issues-and it has raised awareness of the need...

Health care professionals can help identify victims of human trafficking, who commonly come into contact with providers during captivity. Providers can also help restore the physical and mental health of trafficking survivors. Training should focus on recognizing trafficking signs, interviewing techniques, and recommended responses when a victim is identified.

Global mental health has rapidly attracted increasing attention by health policy makers and researchers during the last 10 years. The groundwork for this shift was laid in data beingmade available on the prevalence (Demyttenaere et al. 2004) and burden (Lopez et al. 2006) of mental disorders and also on the resources allocated to mental health within countries (WHO, 2001, 2005, 2011, 2015). Pub...

Mental health is a fundamental issue from the public and global perspective, strongly associated with an increasing awareness that „there is no health without public mental health“(WHO 2005, Royal College of Psychiatrists 2010) as well as with the well-known slogan of WHO Alma Ata Conference (1978) „health for all in the Year 2000“. Even more, global mental health has a great importance for the...

In September 2015, mental health was included in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this historic step, the United Nations (UN) acknowledged the burden of disease of mental illness, and defined mental health as a priority for global development for the next 15 years. On the road to this achievement, many individuals and organisations have played a role in contributing to the inclus...