In which countries does mental health have the most impact?

Although mental health affects many people around the world, there is often not adequate provision for those suffering from it.

In some lower income countries, there is only one health worker per 100,000 population compared with more than 50 in some higher income countries, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) mental health atlas for 2014.

In countries such as Tajikistan and Ghana, mental health spending is lower than $2 (£1.30) per capita compared with $330 in Sweden, the highest spending country among those that provided data to WHO.

However, it is not just about spending. Figures released by WHO in 2012 show that many of the countries most affected by mental health are not among the world’s poorest.

Examples include Estonia, Belarus and Russia, which have among the world’s highest mental health disability adjusted life years (DALYs) per 100,000 people.

WHO describes DALYs as: “The sum of years of potential life lost due to premature mortality and the years of productive life lost due to disability.”

Only one low income country (Afghanistan) features in the top 20, with 5,457 mental health DALYs per 100,000 people.

Countries losing the least years to mental health are generally low income ones, with Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau and Niger at the bottom of the list.

This is not to say that people’s mental health is better in low income countries.

It perhaps just has less of a visible effect in areas where there is higher poverty, conflict or worse health provision generally.

For example, the spread of Ebola is thought to have caused a spate of mental health issues in Sierra Leone as people struggled to deal with the psychological issues caused by the disease.

On Mental Health Day 2015 – 10 October – WHO is trying to raise awareness of how a lack of mental health provision and the social stigma surrounding the disease can lead to a loss of dignity for sufferers around the world.