Our society has long placed a stigma upon the mentally ill, at best shunning them, at worst making them objects of mockery, with among the biggest insults in our culture being aspersions on someone’s state of mental health—sira ulo, baliw, buang.
But the truth, says the Philippine Psychiatric Association, is that mental health issues are far more prevalent than the average person might realize, and that these hit close to home—literally.
“There is hardly a family,” says PPA public relations officer Rene Samaniego, M.D., “that hasn’t had a member who suffer from a mental health issue. Mental illness is common, and its prevalence in the Philippines is increasing, despite its manageability.”
To bring this awareness to the public, PPA and the Philippine Mental Health Association have organized a multi-stakeholder forum on the Philippine Mental Health Act today at the PHMA auditorium in Quezon City, to discuss mental health care in the country and the steps to take to make it part of the country’s universal health care coverage.
According to the PPA, the World Health Organization says that “one in four persons will have a mental illness at any given time in his or her life,” caused by biological, psychological, and social factors, the latter including conditions such as poverty, disaster, conflict, displacement, migration, even urban congestion.
One of the leading causes of mental disability, says the WHO, is major depression. This is more common than we realize. Perhaps we know friends and family who are suffering from this; it might be someone living with you, or it might even be you, if not now, then at some point in the future, depending on what life brings.
We need to be discerning about the people in our lives who might already be bearing this burden unknown to us, and who need help.
Almost everyday the media carry news about people committing suicide, quite a number of them young people; people running amok and injuring or killing random victims; people being unable to function normally in daily life. Perhaps some of these incidents might have been prevented had the person received professional help.
Factors including stigma, fear, and ignorance result in a treatment gap, with patients unable to access treatment, or such treatment being unavailable. What we need, says the PPA, is a comprehensive multi-sectoral approach to mental health.
“Key to this,” says the PPA, “is a comprehensive national mental health law that integrates mental health care into primary health care.”
What is shocking to learn is that the Philippines has no such comprehensive law, one of the few countries in the world without one.
There are two such laws being proposed progressive lawmakers. In the Senate, Sen. Pia Cayetano filed HB No. 2910, and in the Lower House, Reps. Walden Bello, Leni Robredo, and others filed House Bill No. 5347.
Both laws provide for access to an integrated, organized, and efficient mental health care system that cares for patients’ mental health in conjunction with their physical health: the two aspects being “interdependent and inseparable, that mental illness results in severe disability when untreated and unmanaged,” says the PPA.
Dr. Samaniego says “everyone has a role to play in breaking the vicious cycle of stigma on, ignorance about, and fear of mental illness that causes the discrimination, abuse, and neglect of people with mental illness.”
We must break the stigma, he said, and also “put prevention and treatment in place.”
The passage of a rights-based comprehensive mental health care law will protect and respect the rights and freedoms of those with mental health issues, provide for their care, and set the direction “for a coherent, rational, and unified response” to the country’s various efforts in this matter.
With forums such as this one and others that will be held in the future, the discourse on mental illness must, over time, bring about positive changes in the way we as individuals and as a society treat the mentally ill: with compassion and kindness, rather than fear and ridicule.
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