Invest in Mental Health

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/opinion/invest-in-mental-health.html

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To the Editor:

“A Call to Foster Mental Health Across the Globe” (news article, April 13) comes at a time when a full-blown campaign is necessary. Violence, climate change, poverty, forced migration and infectious disease are claiming countless lives, and the ones who witness and survive, their mental health.

The World Health Organization has projected that depression will be the No. 2 cause of disability by 2020.

Although the focus of the recent World Bank and the World Health Organization meeting was economic, it is relevant to note that access to mental health care will save billions of dollars and lives.

For each person who suffers from a mental illness, each family and each community suffer as well.

The global community should learn the early warning signs of diminished mental health and the steps needed to protect the individual.

Investing in mental health is the most important investment we can make right now; it will renew our capacity to invest in people (or the lives of people), here and around the globe.

VIVIAN B. PENDER

New York

The writer, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is chairwoman of the NGO Committee on Mental Health, a coalition of 50 NGOs in consultative status with the United Nations.