Mental Illness on the rise worldwide

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  Mental illness is responsible for as many lost workdays worldwide than any physical affliction like cancer, heart disease and even back pain, according to recent study by the American Medical Association.   From 1 to 5% of the populations of most of the countries surveyed had serious mental illness, according to the findings.  And in most of the countries, 9 to 17 percent of those interviewed had had some episode of mental illness in the last year, whether serious or less severe, said the study, by researchers from the World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School.   "The level of role impairment we found to be associated with serious mental disorders was staggering: more than a month in the past year when the respondents reported being totally unable to work," said one chief author, Dr. Ronald C. Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard. In poor countries, about 80 percent of serious cases went untreated, but even in richer countries 35 to 50% of cases had not been treated in the last year. The surveys asked about treatment not just by psychiatrists and psychologists but by family practitioners, members of the clergy, shamans and herbalists. Earlier efforts to assess mental health across the globe have been frustrating, experts said. Those efforts either tried to match disparate national surveys or relied on the "global judgments of clinicians," said Dr. Robert L. Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, who was not involved in the new study and who praised Dr. Kessler's work. Dr. Ronald W. Manderscheid, chief of the Department of Health and Human Services division that does national mental health surveys, said, "It's fantastic and wonderful that data has been collected cross-nationally using a common methodology.'' The findings were based on 60,643 face-to-face interviews with adults in 14 countries. Eight countries were defined as rich: the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and Japan; six were deemed poor or nearly poor: Mexico, Colombia, Ukraine, China, Lebanon and Nigeria. Within each country, whether rich or poor, the study took into account the economic status of respondents. WSN