WOxlD HEALTH ORGANIZATION
ORGANISA nON MONDIALE DE LA SANTE
REGIONAL OFFICE FOR THE WESTERN PACIFIC BUREAU RtGIONAl DU PACIFIQUE OCCIDENTAL
REGIONAL COMMITTEE Forty-fourth session Manila 13-17 September 1993 Agenda item 25
WPR/RC44/NGO/9
17 September 1993 ORIGINAL: ENGLISH
STATEMENT BY DR ANTONIO P. PERLAS, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE WORLD ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOSOCIAL REHABILITATION
As the representative of the World Association for Psychosocial Rehabilitation to the forty-fourth session of the WHO Regional Committee for the Western Pacific, I am indeed honoured to address this august body. I would like to speak for the calise of mental health and psychosocial consequences and management of special life events. I am sure you are all familiar with the psychiatric illnesses comprising not only of those severely disturbed such as the psychotics who are institutionalized in mental hospitals but also those who suffer from milder forms of illness who, in some form or another, continue to marginally function in society. I am sure you are all familiar with the problems of substance abuse, including alcoholism and drug addiction, which continue to plague our society in ever increa~ing numbers. These classical forms of mental health problems by themselves cont.inue to drain resources from the economy of countries. In fact, in the 1993 World Development Report of the World Bank, neuropsychiatric diseases have been identified as one of the major groups of diseases which cause loss of healthy life as measured by the disability-adjusted life years (DALY). In fact, on a worldwide basis, it is ranked first among the noncommunicable diseases, higher than cancer and nutritional deficiency, and fourth among all the causes of disability, following respiratory infections, diarrhoea and perinatal causes in descending order. In China, it is ranked second among all causes and out-ranked only by cancer. And in "other Asia and islands" it is ranked fourth, coming after respiratory infections, diarrhoea and perinatal causes in that order. These statistics by themselves tell the story of grave concern when it comes to neuropsychiatric diseases. However, I would like to additionally call the attention of this august body to situations requiring psychosocial interventions but which interventions usually get relegated to the background if not forgotten. I refer to the emergence of new sources of human miseries and the changing nature of the human environment. I refer to such events as natural as well as man-made disasters, crowding from over-popUlation and migration propelled by industrialization, environmental pollution in its many variants and the violence so rampant today whether
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in war-torn countries or in otherwise peaceful ones. The· victims of these occurrences are all under stress and the resulting distress if severe and unattended can very well lead to mental health problems. Governments usually respond to these "ecological" and natural disasters by paying attention to the physical infrastructures and physical needs of victims and sometimes forgetting that the victims are people who feel and that their emotions should be healed if they are to become participants in their own recovery. . I would like therefore to strongly suggest that in your planning for the next few years for thl} Western Pacific Region of WHO, the field of mental health including the use of psychosocial intervention required by the emerging sources of human miseries be given due importance. Thank you.
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