SSM - Mental Health (Dec 2023)
Challenges facing the psychiatric reform and mental health care in Brazil: Critical unmet needs and prospects for better integrating the public and university sectors
Abstract
In Brazil, two main mental health care sectors (public and academic) coexist, interact, and tension each other with distinct, antagonistic views and ethos, producing a scenario of distancing and mistreatment. All the leading players involved need to take a new stance to openly discuss the roots of their divergences and accept the challenge of formulating a minimally joint and integrated project for the Brazilian mental healthcare system policy and practices.Here we present and discuss five critical unmet needs of the mental health system that should be tackled through more integrated work between the public and university sectors aiming at: 1. Providing better emergency care, including, when required, inpatient treatment in general hospital psychiatric units for patients with severe mental disorders in acute episodes; 2. Optimizing the use of clozapine, granting a trial for all patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia and other severe psychoses; 3. Updating the list and protocols of use of psychiatric drugs available in the Brazilian Unified Health System; 4. Updating psychosocial rehabilitation interventions; 5. Implementing a two-way collaboration between the network of mental health services, especially the CAPS, and Primary Care Centers to offer integrated healthcare, addressing thus the high physical morbidity of patients with severe mental disorders.Psychiatric reform in Brazil has gone a long way in the past few decades toward community-centered mental health care. It was never an easy process, proper funding was always a challenge, and the risk of political drawbacks loomed, particularly in the last years. We believe the country has the necessary resources to deliver high-quality and accessible mental health care. Now is the time to better integrate the public and university sectors to address the critical issues and move forward with the psychiatric reform agenda.
