Last week, the Associated Press reported on the deplorable state of Kenya’s only psychiatric hospital — where locking patients up and over-drugging them appear to be the norm. Things are so bad, recently 40 patients actually escaped from the hospital.
Mental health treatment continues to lag — sometimes quite severely — in under-developed countries throughout the world. Many countries in Africa continue to treat people with a mental illness as though they had leprosy or some other inexplicable, communicable disease.
Because so little is understood about mental illness by some of the peoples of these countries, family members are often outcast and given over to well-meaning — but severely understaffed and under-resourced — professionals. This is of little surprise when poverty is so rampant in countries like Kenya.
Family members with schizophrenia, one of the more frustrating mental illnesses to treat, often face a bumpy treatment road filled with potholes and setbacks. Many people with schizophrenia believe there’s nothing wrong with them. Or the medications they take often have significant, negative side effects.
If you’re not familiar with Georgia Tech’s 
A story by Jaime FlorCruz over at CNN today caught my eye about mental health problems in China. The journalist asks a simple question, “Are mental health problems in China getting worse?”
Last week, we noted along with many news outlets that a biomarker had been apparently discovered for PTSD. The researchers claimed they had a new tool to help make a differential diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 
As lawmakers across the country continue to pass