Vitoria (EFE).- Psychiatry has verified that mental health problems have come out of the closet with the pandemic, so that anxiety and depression have grown by 25% worldwide.
This has been verified by the head of the Psychiatry, Clinical Psychology and Mental Health Service of the Hospital de La Paz in Madrid, Maria Fe Bravo.
It was during the presentation of the XXXI Psychiatry Update Course in Vitoria, where he clarified that the coronavirus is not the only one responsible for the increase in cases,
The head of the Psychiatry Service of the Álava Mental Health Network, Edorta Elizagarate, and the director of the Psychiatry Service at the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona, Narcís Cardoner, also participated.
Bravo explained that after the pandemic, the demand for mental health care has increased considerably, although many cases are prior to the outbreak of the covid.
He specifically cited adolescents, a group in which more mental problems had already been noticed before the pandemic.
Pandemic disorders and mental health
As he has exposed, the disorders caused by the covid do not seem to be so related to the concern about being infected or not.
Rather with the restrictions in social life, the fear that close people will get sick and mourning for the death of relatives.
The psychiatrist has linked the increase in cases with “awareness” regarding mental health, so that “people now express it.”
He has appealed in any case to “distinguish between mental health and emotional discomfort” to “not trivialize the problem.”
This greater demand for specialized assistance has shown that “there are not enough resources” and has caused the emergencies and consultations to be “overflowed”.
It is necessary to “strengthen mental health teams”: this greater social awareness of this problem must translate into a larger budget, he added.
To make up for the “lack of professionals” and the upcoming retirement of those who are now active, he has proposed incorporating training in skills, using new technologies to support treatment and promoting group psychotherapies “which are very effective and allow reaching to more people.”
Narcís Cardoner also lamented “the limitations” that professionals face when caring for these patients.
“Mental health has always been the poor sister of healthcare”, explained the Catalan psychiatrist, who has complained about the “lack of foresight when it comes to training psychiatrists and clinical psychologists”.
He agreed with his colleague that “the pandemic has been the trigger that has revealed something that has been seen coming for a long time.”
Depression, mental disorder of more than a million Spaniards
He cited depression as an example, of which “generation after generation there are more and more severe cases.” There is something underlying, ”she has added.
Cardoner has underlined the importance of this mental disorder that between one and two million Spaniards suffer to varying degrees.
This makes depression “a common disease”, which in a “significant percentage” does not respond to the usual treatments.
For these cases of resistant depression, drugs with an “alternative” approach are being sought, such as a drug available in Spain since the end of last year whose active ingredient is esketamine and which makes “the patient feel better in a few hours.”
In addition, work is being done at an experimental level with psychedelics and, although it is still early to draw conclusions, “the future is very hopeful for each to improve the quality of life of these patients.”
These and other questions will be analyzed in the XXXI Update Course in Psychiatry that is held in Vitoria and in which 500 mental health experts participate, 200 of them online.
Of the latter, more than half are from Latin America and the United States. EFE