No Health Without Public Mental Health - A Strategic Roadmap for Pakistan
Abstract
Pakistan faces a mental health emergency with mental disorders affecting around 24 million individuals. The economic implications are equally devastating. The economic burden of mental illness reached approximately £2.97 billion in 2020, while the allocated mental health budget of 2.4 billion PKR represents merely 0.4% of total health expenditure, covering less than 2% of the actual burden. Current mental health approaches in Pakistan fail because they treat symptoms while ignoring root causes. Traditional biomedical models focus on individual pathology while systematically overlooking the traumatic experiences that drive mental health outcomes across Pakistani society. To address this failure of symptom-focused care, and the mismatch between current approaches and what people actually need, we propose a special initiative as an alternative framework for mental health in Pakistan through an approach that recognizes trauma and adversity as primary drivers of mental health outcomes and structures entire systems around this understanding.
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