Abstract
Mental disorders have an enormous impact in our society, both in personal terms and in the economic costs associated with their treatment. In order to scale up services and bring down costs, administrations are starting to promote social interactions as key to care provision. We analyze quantitatively the importance of communities for effective mental health care, considering all community members involved. By means of citizen science practices, we have designed a suite of games that allow to probe into different behavioral traits of the role groups of the ecosystem. The evidence reinforces the idea of community social capital, with caregivers and professionals playing a leading role. Yet, the cost of collective action is mainly supported by individuals with a mental condition - which unveils their vulnerability. The results are in general agreement with previous findings but, since we broaden the perspective of previous studies, we are also able to find marked differences in the social behavior of certain groups of mental disorders. We finally point to the conditions under which cooperation among members of the ecosystem is better sustained, suggesting how virtuous cycles of inclusion and participation can be promoted in a ‘care in the community’ framework.
Highlights
Mental disorders have an enormous impact in our society, both in personal terms and in the economic costs associated with their treatment
We had participants play two dyadic games, namely the Trust game, in which they had to lend money to another player who obtains a return, and has the option to send some money back to the lender; players played in both roles. They played the well known Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which they had to choose to cooperate or to try to benefit from the other’s cooperation. They played a collective risk dilemma, in which the whole group had to reach a common goal to avert a catastrophe that most likely would wipe out their money
As a first general remark, through our lab-in-the field experiment we found that an ecosystem approach to mental health care brings with it a quite complex scenario with several interesting insights
Summary
Mental disorders have an enormous impact in our society, both in personal terms and in the economic costs associated with their treatment. Most research addressed the issue of behavioral differences between individuals with MD and healthy populations[6,7,11,12,13,14,15,16] These works, that point to cognitive and affective processing impairments[6,16,17], further support the idea that MDs are associated with significant and pervasive difficulties in social cognition and altered decision-making at various levels. Despite these studies are of very much interest, they are primarly concerned with dyadic interactions among people with specific MDs. Yet, despite these studies are of very much interest, they are primarly concerned with dyadic interactions among people with specific MDs That is, they lack insights into the complexity of individual behaviors of MD within a specific social context
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