Countdown Global Mental Health 2030 is an initiative that aims to monitor and assess mental health and its treatments across the world.
The Countdown is intended to target the current lack of unified, robust data on global mental health and strategies for treatment. There are current attempts to monitor mental health, such as the World Health Organisation’s Mental Health Atlas which tracks the available services in countries across the world. However, there is extremely low coverage of mental health globally; only 29% of WHO member states compile mental health data as part of general health statistics.
The nature of mental health is that it is difficult to assess because of the lack of scientific tests to identify people suffering from poor mental health. Data often rely on self-reporting or surveys which can be affected by social and cultural factors, among other issues.
‘I am convinced that many countries are not even aware of the mental health burden in their population,’ said Dévora Kestel, WHO Director of mental health and substance abuse. ‘So we need a stronger argument. If they do things that are doable in terms of funding they will be able to improve the mental health of the population – and also the economy of the country’.
The project will produce a scorecard for each country every two years to identify countries with successful treatment plans and encourage the uptake of these treatments in countries with less successful treatments.
‘When it comes to mental health, all countries are developing countries,’ said Shekhar Saxena, a Harvard professor and previous WHO director of mental health and substance abuse. ‘There will be comparisons across countries and across time. We need to measure how much progress we have made, and establish how we allocate resources’. Professor Saxena is a key contributor to the project alongside others from organisations including WHO and The Lancet.