Almost 25% of people in Mexico have a mental illness

From the Latin American Herald Tribune:

MEXICO CITY – Nearly a quarter of Mexico’s 107 million people suffer from some kind of mental illness, and some 3 million of them have serious afflictions like schizophrenia that require hospitalization, neuropsychiatrist Jesus Ramirez Bermudez told Efe.

“The numbers are very big, almost a fourth of the population. About 25 percent have some problem, possibly severe addictions, depression, anxiety or something else,” Ramirez said while commenting on his recent book, “Brief Clinical Dictionary of the Psyche,” published this year by Random House Mondadori.

Ramirez, head of the Neurophychiatry Unit of the National Neurology and Neurosurgery Institute, said in an interview with Efe that patients with the most dramatic mental disorders need specialized attention.

“Generally schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome are found in 2-3 percent (of the population), which means 2 to 3 million Mexicans,” he said.

“The biggest problems are obsessive-compulsive disorders, anxiety disorders like phobias, panic attacks and posttraumatic stress caused by episodes of violence,” Ramirez said.

The specialist said that many of these problems spring from social conditions like poverty and violence.

Ramirez cited figures from the World Health Organization indicating that in the 1980s and ‘90s, the suicide rate increased by up to 70 percent in Mexico.

He also said that “in Mexico the health-care budget is low, but for mental health it is less than 1 percent (of the total) and is entirely insufficient.”

Schizophrenia, he said, is a chronic mental illness in which there is a distortion of reality – the person suffers delirium, and situations that may seem ridiculous to us are real for the patient and can lead to dramatic consequences.

He recalled the case of a person convinced that he had a demon inside his body and stabbed himself in the abdomen to get it out.

In past decades such disorders as personality changes occurred from an illness called neurosyphilis.

He once had a patient who complained of a sore back and said he was Atlas and that his mission was to carry the world on his shoulders, which was why “he had his back broken in pieces.”

Ramirez said that each clinical case is unique and all of them cannot be measured with the same ruler – “they need unique questions and unusual answers.”

In his book he includes cases of diverse illnesses such as multiple-personality disorder, delirium, grief, schizophrenia, manias, depression, paranoia and psychosis.

The specialist said that while the brain has a biochemical language, there are emotional elements that can distort its way of functioning.

He told of a woman with a dangerous brain tumor that stimulated pleasure centers in her brain, so that she was always happy and in a good mood.

After the malignant brain tissue was excised, the woman lost her senses of smell and taste and also her interest in sex, all of which plunged her into a state of gloom.

Ramirez said it’s not enough to know how the brain works, it is also necessary to observe the personality, and added that medicines are useful but by no means the complete answer.

With regard to politicians, he said that while they are people who can have personality disorders like narcissism, antisocial behavior, split personalities, obsessive-compulsive disorder and more, it is not possible to diagnose them from what they say.

“I have had the occasion of treating people with those problems and who are in positions where they must make important decisions,” he said, and added that this is reflected in their style of governing.

On another topic, he acknowledged that while among Mexico’s numerous spiritualists, witches and wizards there are many charlatans who manipulate the faith of others, some of them could be authentic mystics suffering from delirium and hallucinations.