Challenges

Description
Early identification, regular follow-up and good quality mental health care are essential to one’s health status. However, fear of stigma and lack trust in the healthcare workers inhibit people’s willingness to seek help. Training primary health care staff and providing the right tools are therefore essential to successful mental health screening.

Goal
Minimize stigma and discrimination and decrease the risk of human rights violations existing in psychiatric hospitals.

Action
Integrating mental health screening in primary care services generates great health outcomes at reasonable cost.

Description
Help-seeking for mental health problems is defined as “an adaptive coping process that is the attempt to obtain external assistance to deal with mental health concerns”. It includes both formal (e.g., health services) and informal sources of help. Facilitating access to mental health care and offering a positive experience is essential for people to ask for help with confidence.

Goal
Helping people understand the importance and utility of mental health care seeking and creating favorable conditions so they can ask for help.

Action
Creating the necessary tools to facilitate access to mental health assistance and having a positive client experience for people who seek help.

Description
Research shows that almost half of all lifetime mental illnesses begin by age 14. Early identification of mental health problems needs to be encouraged in all educational institutions and promotion and prevention practices should be implemented by teaching staff.

Goal
Promote and disseminate effective practices that prevent mental health problems in children and adolescents.

Action
Integrating mental health assessment, prevention and care practices in children’s healthcare and education.

Description
While the link between suicide and mental disorders (in particular, depression and alcohol use disorders) is well established, many suicides happen impulsively in moments of crisis with a breakdown in the ability to deal with life stresses, such as financial problems, relationship break-up or chronic pain and illness.

Goal
Engage in follow-up care and support those bereaved by suicide and find ways to prevent this public health problem.

Action
Making comprehensive and integrated efforts to prevent suicide, such as providing support and plans for regular and well-coordinated follow-up.

Description
A lack of awareness about dementia results in barriers to early diagnosis and treatment and risk of stigmatization. Opportunities can be created for electronic learning to ease older people and their caregiver’s access to early intervention programmes and also social networks for support.

Goal
Provide the right tools to raise awareness about diagnosis, treatment and support opportunities.

Action
Improving the quality of life of people with dementia through early diagnosis, adequate treatment and support for caregivers.

Description
Chronic physical and mental conditions can decrease the quality of life and result in longer illness duration and consequently, worse health outcomes. Also, this situation poses a great economic burden to the society. Poor people having chronic diseases may face barriers to accessing mental health care, contributing to worsening the mental health problems.

Goal
Facilitate access to mental health care which understands and integrates the individual and their needs specific to their condition.

Action
Integrating tools and strategies that reduce the tension between providers of care, services and support opportunities to help individuals and caregivers manage the process along the pathway to recovery.

Description
Eating disorders are actually serious and often fatal illnesses that are associated with severe disturbances in people’s eating behaviors and related thoughts and emotions. Prevention efforts such as reducing negative risk factors, like body dissatisfaction, depression, or basing self-esteem on appearance, or increasing protective factors should be taken into consideration while trying to tackle eating disorders.

Goal
Reduce the risk factors for eating disorders, in order to decrease the chances that a person will develop an eating disorder.

Action
Targeting and engaging people who are at high risk in order to reduce or discourage the development of an eating disorder.

Description
Depression during and after pregnancy is very common but also treatable. It can be recognized through a set o symptoms and diagnosed in time before the mother or the baby are affected.

Goal
Create a follow-up/monitoring system both for the period the women are pregnant and after giving birth where they can express their feelings and seek help from professionals.

Action
Integrating services for peri and postnatal depression to generate good health outcomes for the women at risk.

Description
The term addiction, usually refers to substance use, with a focus on alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs. In addition to substances, people can also develop an addiction to behaviors, such as gambling or internet addiction. Taking into consideration that addictions harm not only individuals but also communities, prevention and management strategies are required to decrease the percentage of people who are dealing with this issue.

Goal
Increase awareness of how substances can affect humans’ lives and which are the risks to which they expose and promote managing of cravings and temptations.

Action
Creating a support or withdrawal system for the people dealing with addiction and finding innovative solutions for early identification and prevention of addictions.

Description
Coping with physical or mental illness requires adequate resources that are not always available to all people. As a result of physical diseases, less resilient individuals are more vulnerable to mental health problems.

Goal
Offer psychosocial support as resources in terms of resilience, to help people cope with physical or mental illness.

Action
Minimize mental health distress and disorders through supportive interventions aimed at increasing resilience early on in treatment planning.

Description
Online support groups aim at filling the gap between medical care and the need for emotional support. However, there is a wide treatment-seeking gap for mental health which poses a real challenge.

Goal
Deliver effectively accurate information and guidance to the targeted audience.

Action
Designing online support group tools to guide individuals toward seeking professional help for their mental health problems.

Description
Spirituality can improve mental health and promote recovery by initiating social connections, creating a sense of belonging, encouraging mindfulness, meditation, and self-reflection.

Goal
Improve mental health and promote recovery through spirituality benefits.

Action
Improving mental health by incorporating healthy practices for the mind and body, to positively influence mental health and emotional wellbeing.

Description
“Technology can help doctors focus on the human elements of medicine, rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of diagnosis and data collection.” – Alastair Denniston

Goal
Integrate AI in mental health clinics to facilitate the connection between clinicians and patients.

Action
Using AI to provide data and insights and design treatment plans and monitor patients remotely allows clinicians to devote more of their time to the patients.