Mental Health In Bangladesh

Sylhet, the area of Bangladesh most closely associated with overseas migration, has seen an increase in remittances sent home from abroad, introducing new inequalities. Social change has also been mediated by the global forces of Western biomedicine and orthodox Islam. This book examines the effects of these modernizing trends on mental health and on local, traditional healing as the new inequalities have exacerbated existing social tensions and led to increased vulnerability to mental illness. It is the young women of Sylhet who are most affected. The global economy has increased competition for resources and led to marriage being seen as a route to economic advancement. Parents prefer to give their daughters in marriage to families that will widen their social contacts and enhance their economic and social standing. Accordingly, the young wife's outsider status (and hence vulnerability to mental illness) has increased as it is no longer customary to give daughters in marriage to local kin. Yet, patients and their families do not work out tensions passively. They are active agents in the construction of their own diagnosis. The extent to which patients act or are acted upon is an investigation that runs throughout the book. Alyson Callan is a psychiatrist and anthropologist. She currently works as a consultant psychiatrist in Brent for the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.

Scientific evidence from different countries around the globe shows that those with low or inadequate health-related knowledge and skills include all ages, social, and economic backgrounds. The consequences of this inadequacy simultaneously affect individuals, healthcare systems, and society in many ways, such as healthcare quality and cost. Research on health literacy can provide insight on how to improve the communication of health issues, raise awareness, and promote the lifelong learning of patients and healthcare professionals. Optimizing Health Literacy for Improved Clinical Practices examines the latest advances in providing and helping patients and medical professionals to understand basic health information and the services that are most appropriate. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as patient engagement, mobile health, and health communication, this book is geared towards medical professionals, hospital adminstrators, healthcare providers, academicians, and researchers in the field.

This atlas is aimed at collecting, compiling and desseminating information on mental health resources in the world. It presents updated and expanded information from 192 countries with analyses of global and regional trends as well as individual country profiles. Newly included in this volume is a section on epidemiology within the profiles of all low and middle income countries. It shows that mental health resources within most countries remain inadequate despite modest improvments since 2001. Availability of mental health resources across countries and between regions remains substantially uneven, with many countries having few resources. The atlas reinforces the urgent need to enhance mental health resources within countries.

Today, a variety of gender-based threats and discrimination continue to characterize journalism. Both male and female journalists are prone to online and offline threats, casual stereotypes in their routine work, and discrimination (especially in terms of job opportunities, promotion, and pay-scale). Working in a safe and non-discriminatory environment is the right of all journalists, regardless of their gender. The Handbook of Research on Discrimination, Gender Disparity, and Safety Risks in Journalism is a critical reference book that highlights equal rights in journalism to ensure the safety of women and men. The book investigates the level and nature of threats, both online and offline, faced by journalists as well as gender discrimination in journalism. Best practices and examples that can promote a safe working environment and gender equality in journalism are also presented. Highlighting important themes such as online harassment, sexism, and gender-based violence, this book is ideal for journalists, reporters, media organizations, professionals, researchers, academicians, and students working or studying in the fields of journalism, media and communications, human rights, and women’s studies.

The Social Determinants of Mental Health aims to fill the gap that exists in the psychiatric, scholarly, and policy-related literature on the social determinants of mental health: those factors stemming from where we learn, play, live, work, and age that impact our overall mental health and well-being. The editors and an impressive roster of chapter authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds provide detailed information on topics such as discrimination and social exclusion; adverse early life experiences; poor education; unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity; income inequality, poverty, and neighborhood deprivation; food insecurity; poor housing quality and housing instability; adverse features of the built environment; and poor access to mental health care. This thought-provoking book offers many beneficial features for clinicians and public health professionals: Clinical vignettes are included, designed to make the content accessible to readers who are primarily clinicians and also to demonstrate the practical, individual-level applicability of the subject matter for those who typically work at the public health, population, and/or policy level. Policy implications are discussed throughout, designed to make the content accessible to readers who work primarily at the public health or population level and also to demonstrate the policy relevance of the subject matter for those who typically work at the clinical level. All chapters include five to six key points that focus on the most important content, helping to both prepare the reader with a brief overview of the chapter's main points and reinforce the "take-away" messages afterward. In addition to the main body of the book, which focuses on selected individual social determinants of mental health, the volume includes an in-depth overview that summarizes the editors' and their colleagues' conceptualization, as well as a final chapter coauthored by Dr. David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of the United States, that serves as a "Call to Action," offering specific actions that can be taken by both clinicians and policymakers to address the social determinants of mental health. The editors have succeeded in the difficult task of balancing the individual/clinical/patient perspective and the population/public health/community point of view, while underscoring the need for both groups to work in a unified way to address the inequities in twenty-first century America. The Social Determinants of Mental Health gives readers the tools to understand and act to improve mental health and reduce risk for mental illnesses for individuals and communities. Students preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) will also benefit from this book, as the MCAT in 2015 will test applicants' knowledge of social determinants of health. The social determinants of mental health are not distinct from the social determinants of physical health, although they deserve special emphasis given the prevalence and burden of poor mental health.

In this volume, prominent anthropologists, public health physicians, and psychiatrists respond sympathetically but critically to the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH), which seeks to export psychiatry throughout the world. They question some of its fundamental assumptions: the idea that "mental disorders" can clearly be identified; that they are primarily of biological origin; that the world is currently facing an "epidemic" of them; that the most appropriate treatments for them normally involve psycho-pharmaceutical drugs; and that local or indigenous therapies are of little interest or importance for treating them. Instead, the contributors argue that labeling mental suffering as "illness" or "disorder" is often highly problematic; that the countries of South and Southeast Asia have abundant, though non- psychiatric, resources for dealing with it; that its causes are often social and biographical; and that many non-pharmacological therapies are effective for dealing with it. In short, they advocate a thoroughgoing mental health pluralism.