Addressing the Need for International Forums in Mental Health and Addictions Research

Excerpt

To address issues related to international research in mental health, the World Health Organization (WHO) held a meeting in November 2003 with editors of scientific journals on mental health (Mental Health Research in Developing Countries: Role of Scientific Journals; WHO, 1994). The impetus for this meeting was the recognition of an acute deficiency of research on mental health published by individuals from economically developing and non-English speaking countries in scientific journals. Indeed, a vastly disproportionate amount of research published in scientific journals (as little as 6%; Patel & Sumathipala, 2001) is conducted in high-income countries, even though these nations comprise less than 10% of the world's population. Given that the evidence that influences local mental-health policies and practices is frequently derived from peer-reviewed scientific journals (e.g., Whiteford, 2001), it is crucial for scientific literature to address the diverse realities of health systems and cultural practices internationally (Patel, 2000). The current discrepancy between the production and consumption of this scientific knowledge undermines the relevancy or appropriateness of the resulting corpus of literature, since the extrapolation of findings from developed countries to developing countries is not always possible (Shah & Jenkins, 2000). Saraceno and Saxena (2004, p. 1) have defined this “research gap” as the “difference between the research information that is needed to plan the best possible services in a given setting and what is currently available.” …