One in four individuals suffer from a psychiatric disorder at some point in their life, with 15– 20 per cent fitting criteria for a mental disorder at any given time. The latter corresponds to around 450 million people worldwide, placing mental disorders as one of the leading causes of global morbidity. Mental health problems represent five of the ten leading causes of disability worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in mid 2016 that ‘the global cost of mental illness is £651 billion per year’, stating that the equivalent of 50 million working years was being lost annually due to mental disorders. The financial global impact is clearly vast, but on a smaller scale, the social and psychological impacts of having a mental disorder on yourself or your family are greater still. It is often difficult for the general public and clinicians outside psychiatry to think of mental health disorders as ‘diseases’ because it is harder to pinpoint a specific pathological cause for them. When confronted with this view, it is helpful to consider that most of medicine was actually founded on this basis. For example, although medicine has been a profession for the past 2500 years, it was only in the late 1980s that Helicobacter pylori was linked to gastric/ duodenal ulcers and gastric carcinoma, or more recently still that the BRCA genes were found to be a cause of breast cancer. Still much of clinical medicine treats a patient’s symptoms rather than objective abnormalities. The WHO has given the following definition of mental health:… Mental health is defined as a state of well- being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.… This is a helpful definition, because it clearly defines a mental disorder as a condition that disrupts this state in any way, and sets clear goals of treatment for the clinician. It identifies the fact that a disruption of an individual’s mental health impacts negatively not only upon their enjoyment and ability to cope with life, but also upon that of the wider community.
Perception of persons with ataxia