First the pandemic and now war and economic crisis, with the risks associated with the deterioration of the environment in the background. Mental health is under pressure, and so are the care services that suffer from chronic delays in adjusting to the best standards and poor organization. For a large-scale analysis, representatives of about 40 countries will meet in Rome tomorrow as part of the Global Mental Health Summit. An initiative in collaboration with the WHO that follows the World Mental Health Day, designed to carry forward the action plan drawn up in London in 2018. The call will be based on greater commitment, both on a political and civil society level.
The leadership of Italy
The Global Mental Health Summit is based on Italy’s internationally recognized leadership in the fields of community mental health and the deinstitutionalization of people with mental disorders. Not only are they frequent, but they cause great suffering in people and constitute one of the major causes of disability in the world, accounting for 14.6% of the burden associated with all diseases. “The event aims to foster the development of global action by governments, international organizations and civil society that addresses the many difficulties that mental health care services are encountering in the world, under the pressure of recent health and humanitarian crises ”, anticipates Angelo Picardi, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, of the Behavioral Sciences and Mental Health Center of the ISS, member of the scientific secretariat of the Global Mental Health Summit.
Health expenditure and social costs
The fact is that mental health is an essential component for crisis response and successful economic recovery efforts. WHO recently estimated that depressive and anxiety disorders alone cost the global economy $ 1 trillion a year. However, in the various nations of the world, the proportion of health expenditure allocated by governments to mental health is on average less than 2%, and Italy also does not differ from these values.
The number of people taken in charge is decreasing
The scarce resources allocated to mental health make it extremely difficult to build and maintain efficient systems of care that can provide adequate responses to the needs of people with mental disorders and their families. Fewer people are taken care of by mental health services in Italy: they were 164 for every 10 thousand adult residents in 2019, 143 in 2020, 125 in the first six months of 2021, thanks to the closure of some services in the last two years. temporarily converted to Covid departments. “This is a worrying phenomenon, which suggests that in recent years the difficulties of our mental health services network in meeting people’s needs have worsened,” notes Picardi.
The exit from the pandemic
The ISS Center of Reference for Behavioral Sciences and Mental Health, directed by Gemma Calamandrei, with the support of the Ministry of Health has started the establishment of a permanent network of Mental Health Departments (DSM), a “sentinel network” “Aimed at timely monitoring of health needs to help public decision makers in health planning decisions, even beyond the SARS-CoV-2 emergency. If the discomfort evidently increases, on the other hand the data suggest a progressive exit from the pandemic emergency, such as an increase in psychiatric and psychological visits between January and June 2021 and an increase in remote or mixed modality interventions useful for maintaining continuity of care.