The theme for the 2008 World Mental Health Day campaign is "Making Mental Health A Global Priority - Scaling Up Services through Citizen Advocacy and Action." The day is observed in over 100 countries on October 10 through local, regional and national World Mental Health Day commemorative events and programmes.
Mental disorders affect nearly 12 percent of the world's population - about 450 million or one out of every four people around the world - will experience a mental illness that would benefit from diagnosis and treatment. Mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which people realise their own potential, can deal with normal life stresses so as to work productively and to contribute to their community.
However, the grim fact remains that in countries that need it the most, mental health services run too short of both human and financial resources. This alone should leave little to doubt that much more funding will be required to bridge the ever widening gap.
It will be recalled that writing in these columns on the occasion of WMHD 2003, among other things, we had stated "... mental problems are common everywhere and cause immense human suffering, social exclusion, disability and poor quality of life besides creating economic, social and political problems, which have been lately aggravated by an unprecedented wave of terror."
Now that the much diversified engagement with terror has started boomeranging, with outrageously fiendish suicidal bombing with a deceptive religious label, no time needs be lost on focusing on its major causative factor - mental sickness - by catching its potential victims young so as to avert the monstrous aberration, and to fight terror with sanity.