World Bank’s “Investing in Health”: Mental Health Parity in the Global Health and Development Agenda
Patricio V. Marquez, lead health specialist for Health, Nutrition, and Global Practice at the World Bank, and Shekhar Saxena, director of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at the WHO, discuss the role of mental health in advancing global health and development, writing, “[B]y accepting that mental health is a development challenge, we need to pursue different cross-cutting and multidisciplinary approaches, and funding streams. … Let’s remain optimistic that recent attention and interest on this issue will lead to increased commitments to implementing a global, multisectoral effort to scale up mental health services in primary care and community settings” (4/5).