The World Mental Health Surveys were established by the World Health Organization in 2000 to provide valuable information for physicians and health policy planners. These surveys have shed light on the prevalence, correlates, burden, and treatment of mental disorders in countries throughout the world. This volume focuses on the epidemiology of coexisting physical and mental illness around the world. This book includes surveys from 17 discrete countries on six continents, covering epidemiology, risk factors, consequences, and implications for research, clinical work, and policy. Many physical and mental illnesses share a relationship with one another and often occur simultaneously. Clinicians from the disciplines of both psychiatry and medicine are increasingly faced with both challenges on a daily basis, making this an ideal book for a wide range of health professionals. This is the first book devoted to this topic on such a wide-ranging scale.

The largest and most comprehensive assessment of the burden of disease associated with common mental disorders worldwide.

Mental disorders have profound social, cultural, and economic effects throughout the world. Although most psychiatry and psychology texts provide some basic data on the prevalence and treatment of mental disorders, no previous book has ever presented such data with the breadth or depth of the current volume. Reported here are the first results of the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) Survey Initiative, the largest coordinated series of cross-national psychiatric epidemiological surveys ever undertaken. The general population surveys in the WMH series span 17 countries in all parts of the world. In many of these countries the WMH surveys provide the first community epidemiological data ever available on mental disorders in the population. The detailed information on lifetime prevalence, age of onset, course, correlates, and treatment of mental disorders in this volume provides mental health professionals and healthcare policy planners with an unprecedented state-of-the-art reference on the cross-national descriptive epidemiology of mental disorders.

Mental illness accounts directly for 14% of the global burden of disease and significantly more indirectly, and recent reports recognise the need to expand and improve mental health delivery on a global basis, especially in low and middle income countries. This text defines an approach to mental healthcare focused on the provision of evidence-based, cost-effective treatments, founded on the principles of sharing the best information about common problems and achieving international equity in coverage, options and outcomes. The coverage spans a diverse range of topics and defines five priority areas for the field. These embrace the domains of global advocacy, systems of development, research progress, capacity building, and monitoring. The book concludes by defining the steps to achieving equality of care globally. This is essential reading for policy makers, administrators, economists and mental health care professionals, and those from the allied professions of sociology, anthropology, international politics and foreign policy.

This unique book presents original research from the largest cross-national survey of the epidemiology of mental disorders ever conducted. It provides the latest findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys based on interviews of nearly 150,000 individuals in twenty-six countries on six continents. The book is ordered by specific disorder, with individual chapters dedicated to presenting detailed findings on the prevalence, onset timing, sociodemographic profile, comorbidity, associated impairment and treatment for eighteen mental disorders. There is also discussion of important cross-national consistencies in the epidemiology of mental disorders and highlighting of intriguing patterns of cross-national variation. This is one of the most comprehensive summaries of the epidemiology of mental disorders ever published, making this an invaluable resource for researchers, clinicians, students and policy-makers in the fields of mental and public health.

Community mental health care has evolved as a discipline over the past 50 years, and within the past 20 years, there have been major developments across the world. The Oxford Textbook of Community Mental Health is the most comprehensive and authoritative review published in the field, written by an international and interdisciplinary team.