LONDON (Reuters Health) - The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Tuesday held a mirror up to the way countries deal with mental illness, and found many sorely lacking in terms of spending and provision of quality care.

More than 450 million people worldwide have mental or neurological disorders, accounting for about 12% of the global burden of premature death and disability, WHO notes.

But its newly published "Country Profiles on Mental Health" show that one in three countries spend less than 1% of their national health budgets on treating these conditions.

The profiles, which will be continuously updated, are intended to help countries compare their mental health programmes with recommendations WHO outlined in its World Health Report last year, Dr. Shekhar Saxena, one of the agency's coordinators for mental health, told Reuters Health.

"In this publication we are giving specific country data," Saxena said. "We are saying what countries have and don't have; what they need to do immediately to translate WHO recommendations into action."

WHO thinks that, in an ideal world, between 5% and 10% of the total health budget should be spent on mental health, Saxena said.

In reality, 40% of countries have no mental health policies and 25% have no legislation in the field. Countries like China, Iran, Nigeria, Thailand and Turkey have no specific legislation for mental health.

And Western nations are in many cases no better than their developing counterparts, reinforcing the idea that all countries, rich and poor, need to make mental health a bigger priority, WHO states.

"The main point is that the comparatively rich countries shouldn't be complacent as the situation there is far from ideal," Saxena said. "The burden is high, community interventions are available and accessible if you implement them, but still countries are lagging behind in terms of expenditure and improving modalities of care."

Specifically, WHO would like to see countries moving more of their mental health treatment out of asylums and into community care facilities.

"It is widely accepted that community care is more effective as well as more humane than inpatient stays in mental hospitals," the agency said in a statement. "Surprisingly, a large number of economically developed countries with extensive mental health infrastructure still have a large proportion of their psychiatric patient beds in mental hospitals."

Globally, about 65% of psychiatric beds are in mental hospitals. In Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and South-East Asia, community care is almost non-existent. It is absent in one in three countries in other regions, the new profiles show.

There is also a distinct shortage of mental health professionals in much of the world, the UN agency says.

"More than 680 million people, the majority of whom are in Africa and Asia, have access to less than one psychiatrist per million population. This is the case in large countries with populations over 100 million, like Bangladesh and Nigeria," according to the statement.

The point of the new data is not to create a league table of countries, pointing the finger at those who are the worst offenders, Saxena said.

"Rather, we are making this report available, not only in printed form but online, so that it can be useful to policy and planning. It is actual concrete help; a baseline status report for countries to see where they are and how they improve."

The atlas is available at http://mh-atlas.ic.gc.ca/.

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