8.4 million people are admitted to psychiatric institutions every year. Instead of community support, millions are met with coercion. Instead of recovery, they are met with walls. It’s time to bring them home. In TIME today, Sri Lanka’s President, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, and World Health Organization's Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, call for a shift from institutions to community-centred mental health care. Because right now, nearly half of all public mental health funding still goes to maintaining large psychiatric institutions, while community services go underfunded. It’s time to choose Care Not Custody. It's time to choose community over isolation, autonomy over coercion, dignity over stigma, recovery over restraint. Read the full piece 👉 https://lnkd.in/enQEwh6q Find out more about our Care Not Custody campaign 👉 https://lnkd.in/ePAiNiJq Mark van Ommeren, Aiysha Malik, Dr Antonis Kousoulis MD, DrPH, Divya Sharma, Ali Hasnain, Peter Varnum, Sarah Kline, Dave Gill, Sairica Rose
Tiwa Ayeni Kokob Gebru Kidanu Dr Saleyha Ahsan Luma Bashmi
This distinction between care and custody lands for us too. Our Structured Human Presence Model™ at Talking-Buddy starts from a similar premise: people don't need an institution, or a crisis, to deserve consistent human attention, just someone who reliably shows up. Grateful GMHAN is pushing this shift at the systems level, it's the kind of change that makes room for approaches like ours further upstream.