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

Abstract

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 highincome 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 Bresearch gap^ as the Bdifference between the research information that is needed to plan the best possible services in a given setting and what is currently available.^ Although lowand middle-income (LAMI) countries have traditionally lagged far behind Westernized nations in terms of the volume of published scientific research—an issue lamented already in 1948 by researchers such as Harry Stack Sullivan (Sullivan, 1948)—these countries are being increasingly neglected in contemporary research that is not explicitly cross-cultural (i.e., studies comparing multiple cultures in a single study). Part of the problem stems from what Tyrer (2005), the editor-in-chief of the British Journal in Psychiatry, termed Beditorial racism^ among the pre-eminent mental-health journals. For instance, most leading psychiatry journals have no individuals from developing countries on their editorial Int J Ment Health Addict (2006) 4: 3–5 DOI 10.1007/s11469-006-9001-4