The Truth About Mental Health
Length: Six part series, 26 minutes and 30 seconds each
Available to broadcast: Starting May 31st through August 25th
Download: Each program in this series will be available to download from the BBC Partner Site on the first Friday of their broadcast window starting at 1032 EDT.
Promos: An accompanying promo will also be available to download from the BBC Partner Site.
Description: From anxiety and depression to psychosis, one in four of us will become ill over our lifetime, and over the next 18 years it is predicted that mental health will make THE biggest call on global health resources. Using personal stories, find out how individuals, wherever they live in the world, can have hope that treatment and recovery is possible from a range of painful mental health conditions.
Mental illness doesn’t discriminate. Wealth and social status can’t protect you from its debilitating and frightening impact. Old, young, male, female – 350-million of us have problems with our mental health. An enormous “treatment gap” has been identified. In wealthier, developed countries, half of those who need help simply won’t get it; in lower and middle-income countries those figures rise to 85%. With demand rising and, in a global recession, funds shrinking, this series highlights novel and innovative ways being used, around the globe, to treat and cope with mental illness.
From Africa, to Asia, to the Middle East and to Europe, we explore radically different attitudes and definitions of mental health and mental wellbeing. Using personal stories as our starting point, we hear how individuals (and their families, friends and colleagues), wherever they live in the world, can have hope that treatment and recovery is possible from a range of painful mental health conditions.
Presenter: Claudia Hammond
Program order:
1. Mad or Sad – Last October Keshava was rescued from ten years of solitary confinement in his village outside Bangalore. As police knocked down the walls, the young man emerged, naked, his neck distorted from the weight of his matted hair. He’d been living in a tiny room without doors or daylight. Keshava had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early twenties but unable to get him the help he needed or cope with his violent outbursts, his family gradually walled him in. Claudia looks at the role of culture and how mental illnesses are defined in different countries. She visits Cultural Psychiatrist Micol Ascoli at Newham’s Centre for Mental Health in the UK to find out how cultural differences can be taken into account.
Available: Friday, May 31st through Sunday, August 25th
2. Children and War – It’s a common misconception that children, more than adults, are so resilient that they can bounce back from the emotional and psychological impact of war and conflict. But studies contradict this and world experts in the field warn that, while some children do recover fully from exposure to the horrors of war, others experience long-term mental health problems. As the war and fighting in Syria continues to claim more lives and destroy many others, Claudia reports from Jordan on how this latest conflict is exposing yet another generation to the traumatic impact of violence, killing and loss. She investigates the latest evidence about what actually helps to alleviate the suffering of these children and prevent a life-time of recurring emotional distress.
From the Al Zatari refugee camp in the north of Jordan Claudia hears about the scale of the challenge facing international organizations like Save the Children. And she meets a group of Syrian mental health professionals who, as refugees themselves, are running a mass outreach program, developed by some of the world’s leaders in child trauma, to teach as many Syrian children as possible, psychological techniques and coping strategies.
Available: Friday, June 7th through Sunday, August 25th
3. Four Walls: Solitary Confinement – Solitary confinement is a form of punishment; psychologically it is a form of torture. People held in these conditions talk of how they develop violent thoughts, feelings of helplessness and a complete lack of self. They may commit self-harm, start hallucinating and develop paranoid fantasies. For those in solitary confinement it is very hard to maintain a sense of identity and many lose their sense of reality.
Claudia hears from those who have endured such deprivation, and hears what the latest research reveals about the impact of solitary confinement and imprisonment on mental health. But some people can pull themselves back from the abyss, says psychologist Craig Heaney, who has worked with many people held in solitary confinement in the United States. Claudia discovers the psychological strategies people can employ to resist and protect themselves from the dehumanizing conditions in which they are held.
This program will get to the heart of how we construct our sense of identity and examine the resilience needed to prevent the unraveling of the human psyche.
Available: Friday, June 14th through Sunday, August 25th
4. Healing Norway – When Anders Breivik killed 77 people – most of them teenagers – in Norway, the whole country was traumatized. But the response to this mass murder has been unique. The whole nation, from the King and government downwards, pledged to face the massacre head on….and heal themselves. In the political sense, that national cure took the form of an exemplary criminal trial. But in the social and personal sphere, Norway took the opportunity to road-test on a country-wide scale, psychological support and care for everybody affected.
New techniques were rolled out in every region for survivors, the bereaved, friends and colleagues. Parents and siblings of murdered children were brought together to share and support each other and teachers and school staff have been taught how to protect and care for pupils in the aftermath.
Claudia reports from the fourth (and final) national support group for the parents of Breivik’s victims and hears how Norway’s national experiment provides lessons for other countries when man-made and natural disasters hit.
Available: Available: Friday, June 21st through Sunday, August 25th
5. Treatment Gap – If you have a mental health problem, where you live in the world makes a big difference to the care you’ll receive, but one thing that all countries have in common is a treatment ‘gap’. In many lower and middle-income countries three quarters of people with mental health problems don’t have access to mainstream mental health services, and even in wealthier, developed countries, the figure is close to 50-percent.
In this program, Claudia Hammond investigates some of the alternatives that occupy this ‘gap’. Psychiatrist Dr Monique Mutheru is one of just 25 psychiatrists in Kenya. In the absence of services to meet the mental health needs of Kenyans, traditional healers and witchdoctors play a crucial role in diagnosing and treating them. Claudia looks at a program which is bringing the health workers and traditional healers together, training traditional healers to refer their severely ill patients to the clinic and avoid harmful practices that some healers carry out, such as lobotomy and bloodletting.
Even in the developed countries like the United Kingdom, where mental health services are available and are free, some people with mental health problems feel that the treatments available don’t help them. The Hearing Voices Network provides support to ‘voice hearers’, through support groups, helping them to manage and engage with the voices that trouble them.
Available: Friday, June 28th through Sunday, August 25th
6. Japan: Culture and Stigma – In Japan there are up to a million young people who have withdrawn from society, living solitary lives shut up in their bedrooms, unable to communicate with the outside world or even their parents. They would like to have friends but are fearful of ridicule and fearful for the future. They are known as hikikomori, and this is a condition that is recognized by the Japanese government who is setting up treatment centers. Hikikomori are mainly young men, often older sons from middle-class families, they may have been bullied at school and can remain locked away for decades, turning night into day as they attempt to avoid all human contact. Due to social pressure, their families often feel ashamed of their hikikomori children and worry what their neighbors, friends and relations will think of them.
But is hikikomori a mental illness? Claudia travels to Tokyo to investigate and, through access to an Ibasho “the place where you can be yourself”, she meets recovering hikikomori and their parents.
Available: Friday, July 5th through Sunday, August 25th