Mental Health Literacy

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Pages: 2

Introduction
Mental health literacy as a public issue is new and it is only less than two decades since it began to be under research(1). Mental health literacy is essential to maintain good mental health and reduce mental illness, which is considered one of twenty conditions leading to disabilities worldwide(2).
Mental health literacy defined by Jorm et al. (1990) as: “knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention”. Mental health literacy is what we need to prevent mental illness, recognize it, know help-seeking options, available treatments and help ourselves and others who have mental illness (1).
In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the prevalence rate of mental illness in patients attending primary health care is high and a study conducted in 2002 provided a prevalence of mental illness to be around 18.2%, as like diabetes (3). Unfortunately, Globally, more than 70% of mentally ill people don’t receive any treatment from health organizations(4).
It is widely accepted that knowledge about physical diseases will benefit the public, but the benefits of mental health knowledge are neglected or covered by strong barriers, in comparison with
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People with low literacy are at risk of both physical and mental diseases. Their health is poor, their hospitalization rates are high and they incur more care costs than people with adequate literacy do(6). Low literacy delays patients’ help-seeking, prevents them from engaging perfectly in the care process and increases their omission of treatment(4,6,7). Patients with low literacy are unable to recognize early symptoms, face difficulties in delivering appropriate information practitioners need, may don’t have psychiatric terms to report the correct symptoms or may put the required information in an illogical series