Clinical Research Case Report

Abstract

Prevention of mental disorders offers opportunities for decreasing enormous health, economic, and social burden attributable to them. Substantial evidence exist showing effectiveness of prevention strategies in reducing risk factors, strengthening protective factors, and decreasing psychiatric symptoms and disability. The government and various stakeholders should work toward developing policies on national and regional levels for the prevention of mental disorders and integrate them with various public policies. Research should be focused on enhancing the evidence base for these interventions. It should also cover additional domains such as quantification of the burden of disease associated with particular risk factors, the interaction between lifestyle behaviors and mental health, and integrating mental health outcome measures in large community-based interventions for noncommunicable diseases. Special efforts should be made in devising alternative strategies to deliver these programs in low-resource settings. Integrating the research from the field of neurosciences with prevention strategies can augment the effort in this direction. One of the important challenges is to design programs that are either indigenously developed or culturally adapted. Mental health professionals have to play an important and multiple roles to make prevention of mental and behavioral disorders a reality.