Global Mental Health: a Re-emerging Movement. The Vision and the Implementation.

In recent years centres dealing with global mental health came into existence in London, New York, New Delhi, Melbourne and possibly elsewhere. To what an extent the creation of these centres was connected with the lesser visibility of Mental Health program of the World Health Organization (WHO) which was previously the main international agency dealing with global mental health issues is not easy to say. The WHO mental health division produced a medium term global mental health program (as well as various other important documents) and emphasized the need to close the gap between mental health needs and the response to them but its concrete presence e.g. as an agency relying on a large network of collaborating centres in different parts of the world or as the agency which coordinates major international collaborative studies became weaker in the past two decades, for a variety of reasons. The decision of the United Nations (UN) to discuss how to overcome the challenge of noncommunicable diseases (such as diabetes and cancer) leaving mental and neurological disorders out of that debate was also an indicator of the position that the mental health program has within the WHO which was the technical agency preparing the UN debate.