This year’s World Mental Health Day, is on 10 October and we are starting now to start drawing attention to that day. The vison of Michelle Lande Clark is that all the mental health advocacy groups unite to change the mental health system.. When she first became an advocate in 1987, she immediately saw why the mental health system was in shambles and has made it her life’s mission to unite the advocates. That is why she started Mental Health Advocates United. She has been writing to politicians, the media, and others since 2011. She envisions a time where the mentally ill are considered as “normal people” and that mental illnesses are classified as mental disorders or a “physical” problem and is no different than diabetes, liver disease, heart disease, etc.
Michelle works tirelessly on behalf of the mentally ill so that people are educated by the media about the various mental illnesses, people are not afraid to seek help due to the stigma, prisons are not used as a place for the mentally ill, there are enough doctors and psychiatric facilities available so that people are not waiting in the emergency rooms or transferred miles away to get treated. Also, she is hoping that police officers and prison guards are trained effectively to help these individuals ending the severe problem of the mentally ill being shot and killed.
This year comes at a time when our daily lives have changed considerably as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The past months have brought many challenges: for health-care workers, providing care in difficult circumstances, going to work fearful of bringing COVID-19 home with them; for students, adapting to taking classes from home, with little contact with teachers and friends, and anxious about their futures; for workers whose livelihoods are threatened; for the vast number of people caught in poverty or in fragile humanitarian settings with extremely limited protection from COVID-19; and for people with mental health conditions, many experiencing even greater social isolation than before. And this is to say nothing of managing the grief of losing a loved one, sometimes without being able to say goodbye.
The economic consequences of the pandemic are already being felt, as companies let staff go in an effort to save their businesses, or indeed shut down completely.
Given past experience of emergencies, it is expected that the need for mental health and psychosocial support will substantially increase in the coming months and years. Investment in mental health programs at the national and international levels, which have already suffered from years of chronic underfunding, is now more important than it has ever been.
This is why the goal of this year’s World Mental Health Day campaign is increased investment in mental health.
The Director General of the World Health Organiztion is Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, His vision can be found here.
Everything you need to know about WHO, the organization behind all of this can be found here.
Mental Health Advocates United 