The Spanish Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health (SEPSM) has urged an end to the stigma that still weighs on mental disorders and for citizens to distinguish between transient emotional distress and an illness that requires treatment, with the aim of avoiding the trivialization of these pathologies.
"We have a huge public health challenge ahead of us," stated the president of SEPSM, Marina Díaz Marsá, in this regard, who highlighted that, if it is managed to overcome it, those people who "really need it" will be able to access "quality" psychiatric care.
To advance this objective, the scientific society has launched an informative campaign made up of nine short videos, conceived to explain with medical precision and a close tone the most frequent mental disorders and reduce the social stigma that still surrounds them.
These audiovisual capsules, which will be broadcast every Wednesday through the official SEPSM channels, will focus on depression, the difference between daily discomfort and mental illness, warning signs in adolescence, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), suicide, eating disorders (ED), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and psychosis.
With this initiative, the SEPSM aims to combat disinformation and the frivolous or metaphorical use of psychiatric diagnoses in daily language, where expressions such as "I'm depressed", "you're bipolar" or "you're BPD" have spread, especially through social networks.
"These short, emotional, and easily shareable messages simplify very complex experiences and lead many people to identify with clinical labels without medical evaluation, which can lead to misinterpreting what is happening to them and delaying the search for adequate help," the experts explained.
Strengthen the role of the psychiatrist and mental health resources
Through this campaign, the SEPSM also seeks to highlight the figure of the psychiatrist as a medical specialist, with at least 11 years of training, responsible for diagnosing and treating mental disorders based on scientific evidence and clinical practice.
"Listening actively, without judging, speaking, without stigma, can make a difference and it is very important to be able to consult and, of course, from psychiatry we can help," highlights the first video published, titled "Let's talk about depression".
However, the society recalls that psychiatry in Spain faces significant obstacles, including the lack of professionals, with a ratio of 11.5 psychiatrists per 100,000 inhabitants, far below countries like Portugal (14), Belgium (17), Austria and Sweden (22), France (23), Norway (26) or Germany (28).
Furthermore, it warns of the upcoming retirement of around 20 percent of active psychiatrists, of the differences in access to mental health services between autonomous communities, and of added challenges such as the consolidation of the specialty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry or the urgent need to combat stigma, which delays both diagnosis and the initiation of mental health treatments.