Mental Health Matters: Social Inclusion of Youth With Mental Health Conditions
Mental-health conditions, which include behavioural and mental-health problems e.g. depression, anxiety disorders (including post-traumatic stress disorder), and disruptive behavioural disorders (such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mood disturbances, substance use, suicidal behaviour, and aggressive/disruptive behaviour) are the leading causes of adjustment problems in adolescents and young people worldwide. Mental-health conditions have a significant impact on the development of over a billion youth and their social and economic integration, including employability.
Yet, it is also critical that attention to global mental health moves beyond treatment-oriented programmes in health-care settings to include broader approaches inspired by public-health and social-inclusion considerations.
Recently, mental-health conditions have attracted global attention. The 2007 Lancet Series on Global Mental Health (Horton, 2007) led to the launch of a coordinated Movement for Global Mental Health, comprising over 95 institutions and 1,800 individuals worldwide. In 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) produced a Report on Mental Health and Development (2010a), highlighting people with mental illnesses as a vulnerable group subject to stigma and social isolation, human-rights violations and exclusion from policies and decision-making that affected them. Later that year, in its resolution on global health and foreign policy, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the need to target mental health in development, reinforcing previous international commitments toward mainstreaming disability issues in development. The WHO has developed the Mental Health Gap Action Programme, along with technical tools to support non-specialist mental-health service capacity in low- and middle-income countries. This international momentum to acknowledge and address the global burden of mental-health conditions is critical to dealing with this issue at a global level.