“Barriers In The Mind: Promoting An Economic Case For Mental Health In Low- & Middle-Income Countries”
Beyond a public health concern, economic barriers hinder the improvement of the availability, accessibility, efficacy, and equity of mental healthcare across all healthcare systems.
Given the disproportionate burden faced by countries of lower income levels, this article addresses the value of economic evidence in fortifying the policy argument for investment in mental health focused on these impoverished regions.
Mental health’s affiliation with premature mortality generates substantial costs to the economy. Regardless of its significance and the emphasis on socioeconomic implications within high-income countries, policy attention and resources in poorer countries disregard mental health. Instead, they focus primarily on infectious diseases.
The defining circumstances of this article illustrate the complexity of analyzing real-world scenarios littered with inconsistencies and impediments.
Despite utilizing scientific methods to formulate theories, economists investigate problems in the real world’s unregulated environment. This distinctive aspect becomes the core economic challenge regarding the decision-making for which assumptions should be used.
In economic theory, real-world analyses are developed according to their correspondent assumptions. Our economic model’s complication, for starters, involves the overwhelming prevalence of economic barriers within healthcare systems. Considering the varying sociodemographic structures, cultural contexts, individual preferences, political priorities, and economic incentives, we can assume these barriers to be obstructive within mental health contexts.
Our assumption allows us to assume any unnecessary factors by identifying the relations among a matrix of interrelated variables along with minimizing a broad spectrum. Following the article’s objective, these barriers can now be regarded as resource barriers to emphasize the considerable impact of scarce resources on mental healthcare services across impoverished nations. We can utilize this theory to produce an unambiguous framework that explores the fundamental economic problem of scarcity and its affiliation with the resource barriers to mental healthcare.
However, regardless of the availability of funds or a fair payment system, they still prevent access to and utilization of mental healthcare services.
When lower-income countries face limited infrastructures and policies, non-governmental organizations’ role as key stakeholders of the funding, coordination, and provision of such services within higher-income countries is vital for overcoming these limitations.
Though emerging evidence-based planning and decision-making have proven to be essential for improving mental health outcomes, it is crucial to note the complexity of merely generalizing from findings of service arrangements or economic research. In the absence of adequate evidence, the authors have underlined the proper use of economic models.
As mentioned, utilizing the role of assumptions in economic theory renders it probable to generate the requisite assumptions that visualize a more profound analysis of these events. By achieving a brief analysis utilizing our previous assumption above, we can successfully indicate the severity of resource insufficiencies due to poor stewardship. As the authors describe these difficulties, they further argued that “investments in poorer countries generate their dividends in the world’s richer nations.” These additional variables must be accounted for to distill our intricate model’s complexities by utilizing the relevance of assumptions in economic theory once more in terms of evidence or practices.
Applying almost exclusively to North America and Western Europe, there is an inherent problem of preexisting biases within policy initiatives highlighting economic assumptions’ problematic nature.
For instance, generalizing the results of evaluating a service intervention in Maryland to Malawi’s mental healthcare system is merely insensible in the absence of qualifying assumptions. Moreover, interpreting an evidence base by assuming only western technologies or interventions prevent and treat mental illnesses effectively undermines our initial model. In addition, it hinders more potentially effective approaches that were not accounted for in the analysis.
Concerning research findings on services and economics, this generalizability issue adds to the familiar decision-making problem for which assumptions we should use in a real-world context. Despite being a significant contributor, these research findings remain distinct from the problem mentioned earlier, underlining the debate of the distinction between equity and effectiveness. In this respect, the 7th principle under the ten principles of economics that read, “Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes,” can be relevant in improving the economy’s state. However, we should note that this ability may not be universal, considering that government interference could produce adverse and unsatisfactory outcomes.
(written for an assignment.)