Every 15 minutes, someone dies from completing suicide. That’s roughly thirty-eight thousand suicides each year. To put that into perspective, that’s twice as many people that die from traffic fatalities in a year. So, what’s happening? Well, Approximately 90 percent of suicides are connected to mental health illnesses, and the field of global mental health within public health that’s a little bit behind.
The World Health Organization characterizes health as a state encompassing complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not just the absence of disease or infirmity. Right there, mental well-being is integrated into the definition of health. So, what causes the hesitancy around discussing this topic? Well, it’s because mental health is frequently stigmatized around the world, and some cultures don’t even have words to describe mental health illnesses. Moreover, broaching this subject is challenging. This is exactly what global mental health professionals work to address. They want to break the stigma around mental health to decrease the global burden of disease due to mental and neurological disorders and to improve the overall well-being of people.
But mental health and well-being go beyond neurological health. Did you know that depression is a risk factor for developing chronic diseases like hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes? The study of mental health is intricate, playing a crucial role in our personal well-being and overall health. Numerous factors, such as the community in which you reside, your access to care, and your sexuality, whether or not you use substances like alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, if you’ve moved between countries and cities, and even how and why you move to your new home.
Global mental health professionals can be researchers, scientists, physicians, field staff, and even people working in outreach. Some work with health care and data analysis, some work in humanitarian settings with refugees and asylum seekers, some work with organizations to change policies and to provide more resources to people, and some work in clinical or hospital settings.
Here at BuzzLushes, we work with all of the factors that impact daily life, teach you how to ask questions to assess mental health, how to conduct mental health research, how to develop themes about why one community might be more effective than another, and prepare you to work with this complex topic in many different settings.
