14.2 Global Task Shifting of Mental Health Resource Delivery

Figure 14.1. Deaths from mental health and substance use disorders, 2016 [Image Description]

In low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the global south, there is a lack of availability of trained mental health professionals, especially doctoral-level providers, such as psychologists and psychiatrists. At the same time, psychological disorders account for 7.4% of the global burden of disease (Purgato et al., 2020), which is a higher percentage than diseases such as HIV/AIDS (3.3%) and malaria (4.6%; Whiteford et al., 2013). The gap between those who need mental health care and those who receive care is very large. An important strategy in global mental health is task shifting, which is the shifting of healthcare tasks from more to less highly trained individuals. For example, tasks that a psychiatrist would typically perform in high-income countries may be shifted to a psychiatric nurse practitioner, parts of what the psychiatric nurse practitioner does can be shifted to a primary care health worker who has not specialized in psychiatry, and some of the primary healthcare worker’s tasks can be shifted to a community-level worker who is not trained in the health sector. Community members can also be trained as lay counselors or peer counselors, enabling them to provide basic psychological support in order to begin addressing the gap between supply and demand for mental health care.

Image Descriptions

Figure 14.2 Image Description. The image is a world map displaying data represented by varying shades of blue. Each country is colored according to a scale indicated at the bottom, ranging from light blue for lower values to dark blue for higher values. Countries with no available data are shown in white. Notably, North America, parts of South America, China, and India are shaded with darker blues, indicating higher values. The map includes all continents with visible geographic outlines, providing a visual representation of numerical data across different regions. [Return to Fig 14.2]