Developing a Mental Health Curriculum to Build Capacity and Improve Access to Mental Health Care in Rural Guatemala

The vast majority of Guatemalans with mental illness do not receive any mental health treatment, yet these disorders cause significant suffering and functional impairment. The mental hea l th treatment gap in Guatemala is underscored by barriers to care in multiple dimensions, including grossly inadequate national funding for mental health, concentration of limited mental health facilities in the capital, ongoing human rights violations, woefully insufficient human resources for mental health care, and institutional stigmatization of the mentally ill. Stigma and false beliefs about mental illness cause barriers at the individual level; these barriers are equally important to address in order to improve access to care.Given these various challenges, we approached our partnership with ALAS from several different angles. Our educational series for non-physicians aims to provide basic mental health education in order to promote awareness and decrease stigma and discrimination among health workers. Our training session for physicians is aimed at integrating evidence-based alcohol screening and brief intervention into existing primary care infrastructure. Together, these projects, which were informed by international guidelines, epidemiological data (where available), and input from local experts and developed according to ALAŚs needs, aim to build capacity for mental health care in one particular region of Guatemala.Disclosures Yedida Rissman and Shani Isaac received funding for this project from the Stanford University Center for Innovation in Global Health. Jorge Alejandro Paiz is the founder of ALAS Pro Salud Mental, a nongovernmental organization that has received funding from the pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Sanofi had no input on the content of this paper. © 2014 Academic Psychiatry.