Mental health will be among the priority concerns of the Caribbean region at the upcoming United Nations High Level Meeting on Chronic Disease Prevention in New York in September, CARICOM has reported.
Guyana’s Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy made the announcement on Saturday, at the closing press conference of the 21st Meeting of the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) in Georgetown. Ramsammy said mental health was not getting the attention it deserved and vowed that CARICOM would again take the lead in launching an offensive against the problem, thereby ensuring that it would not only be “talked about” but would be addressed in the Caribbean.
The decision came in the wake of calls on Friday morning, at the opening ceremony, by Ramsammy for concerted efforts to tackle mental health in a similar manner as other risk factors to Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs). According to CARICOM, Ramsammy reminded the meeting of health ministers, chief medical officers and other stakeholders in health that neuro-psychiatric illnesses represent a particularly disabling problem within the region. “No one can deny that neuro-psychiatric illnesses represent a major burden of disease area, but our collective response has been low profiled and inadequate,” he said. The Report of the Caribbean Commission on Health and Development in 2005, which emanated from the Nassau Declaration 2001–The Health of the Region is the Wealth of the Region–addressed the issue of mental health and CARICOM Heads of Government subsequently mandated the development of a regional plan for mental health. “Unfortunately it has been difficult to obtain reliable data on the epidemiology of mental illness in the Caribbean,” CARICOM said.
However, when isolated studies were done for individual populations, the prevalence rates of the major mental illnesses were not very different from those reported regionally, it added. Analysis of direct and indirect costs of the two major mental illnesses—depression and schizophrenia—
in one member state, for example, revealed that an astonishing J$3.8 billion was spent in one year.
It was against this background that the COHSOD viewed mental health as one of the primary contributing risk factors to NCDs and resolved that this matter, whether or not it was placed on the global agenda, would be included on the health agenda of CARICOM countries.
