British Council hosts seminar on mental health

The British Council Bangladesh hosted a seminar on mental health at its auditorium in Dhaka's Fuller Road on Monday (2 October).

The session was organised by the Bangladesh Association of Commonwealth Scholars and Fellows and supported by British Council. The second session will be held on 16 November at Bangladesh Agriculture University in Mymensingh, according to a press release.

Global Mental Health Statistics were presented at the seminar where it was mentioned that 970 million people around the world struggle with some mental illness or drug abuse, one in four people will be affected by a mental illness at some point in their lives, and 14.3% of deaths worldwide, or approximately 8 million deaths each year, are attributable to mental disorders.

Another study report was presented at the seminar which says that the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on the mental health of the Bangladeshi population. The prevalence of depressive (57.9%), stress (59.7%) and anxiety (33.7%) symptoms in the adult population is now much higher than pre-pandemic rates, it says. Mental healthcare in Bangladesh is enormously inadequate owing to a lack of public mental health facilities, scarcity of skilled mental health professionals, insufficient financial resource distribution and societal stigma, the report mentioned.

David Knox, British Council director in Bangladesh; Monira Rahman, a Commonwealth Fellow and a mental health expert; Professor Dr Rafiqul Islam, former dean, Faculty of Engineering & Technology, Dhaka University and president of the Bangladesh Association of Commonwealth Scholars and Fellows; policymakers from the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and BCSAF members, representatives from private and government educational institutions, healthcare institutions were also present during the session.