Community Mental Health Service: Features, Advantages & Challenges

Table of Contents

What is Community Mental Health Service?

Community mental health service is a decentralized concept of mental health services which is focused on the community setting.
Community mental health service refers to the mental health service provided to the people, outside the institutional setting or premises. These services are extensively delivered in the schools, community parks, workplaces, homes etc.
Community mental health service is an important concept to bridge the gap between mental health needs of a people and services available to them, particularly in a low-resource setting.
Community-based care is intended to reduce the cost of mental health care provided in clinical settings.
It enhances patient centric care and emotional well-being care in a community setting by reducing social stigma and humiliation regarding mental health disorders or illnesses.
Community mental health programs are significant for each network. These projects offer all residents access to fundamental psychological well-being treatment and assets.

Accessibility to the mental health services
Stigma reduction by normalizing mental health issues
Continuity of care through the mobilization of community health workers
Holistic approach of care: addresses social, economic and psychological aspects of mental health
Involvement of multidisciplinary teams in providing the health services: psychologists, social workers, community health workers, psychiatrists, counselors etc.

1. Primary mental health care

Primary mental health care refers to integrating mental health care into primary health care services.
It helps the address the mental health needs of the community people in the community models by offering services close to the home.
Primary mental health care model mobilizes general health care practitioners and physicians to address common mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, substance abuse disorders etc.

2. Outreach services

Outreach services are the extended services that are provided to the community people in the setting outside of the health institution in order to increase their accessibility and utilization of mental health services
Outreach services include home visits, mobile clinics or camps.

3. Psychosocial rehabilitation

Psychosocial rehabilitation helps to integrate people with chronic mental health problems into the society.
It includes vocational training, skill development etc.

4. Peer support and self-help groups

It includes providing support to the people with mental illnesses by those who have previously suffered from similar illnesses or disorders.
Peer support and self-help groups help the mentally ill person to reconnect with his/her similar counterpart and open up their feeling and emotions.
It reduces isolation and fosters empowerment among the mentally ill patients.

5. Crisis intervention

Crisis intervention includes immediate short-term support provided to the mentally ill patients.
It can include services like tollfree numbers, hotline services, emergency counselling etc.

6. School and workplace mental health programs

These programs are designed to provide mental health services in the school and workplace setting.
It helps in the early detection of mental health problems and community-oriented interventions.
It includes training teachers, managers and staffs to identify the early signs of mental health illnesses or disorders.

Advancement of prosperity and emotional wellness advancement
Stigma reduction
Equity promotion: Mental health services will be extended up to the community levels where people of all classes have access to the services
Psychosocial support, (such as the monk’s program in Thailand, the Imam program in Bangladesh, meditation, spirituality etc.)
Increased cost effectiveness
Community based Rehabilitation for the mentally ill patients to avoid disintegration from the community
Empowers individuals and families for long term recovery and social integration
Prevention of damage from alcohol consumption and substance use among the youths
Treatment of the mentally ill persons by utilizing the essential human services framework (Concentrating explicitly on the most well-known and disabling ailments in the community).

Increased accessibility and affordability of services
Early detection and intervention targeted to mental health promotion and wellbeing
Reduced stigma
Continuous care and follow-up of the mentally ill patients
Empowerment and participation of the family and community members in decision making
Comprehensive and holistic care
Extension of mental health services up to the community level
Increased awareness and education among the community members
The ongoing improvement of network psychological wellness firmly underscores the preventive parts of psychiatry in psychological wellness, explicitly through such areas as giving psychological well-being discussion to other expert gatherings within the network, for example, open wellbeing medical caretakers, educators, welfare laborers, and others. This idea of counteractive action inside emotional well-being is in fact the fundamental way of thinking of general wellbeing.
Upgrade the status of psychological wellness inside general wellbeing;
Increment assets distributed to psychological wellness;
Use distributed assets to strengthen network based as opposed to medical clinic-based administrations
Ensure human privileges of the mentally sick more effectively in the community.

Lack of trained professionals
It takes plenty of time and effort to reduce social stigma and discrimination regarding mental health illnesses and disorders
Lack of adequate funding and resources
Lack of sustainability of services due to its insufficient integration in the national health system of the governments.
Policy gaps
Implementation gaps and challenges

Introduction of digital mental health through mobile apps, technology, teletherapy
Integration of non-health sectors in community mental health services
Community participation through participatory models
Policy advocacy and adequate budget allocation for strengthening community mental health services

Centers only around ecological intercessions and largely disregard mental components of individuals functioning.
Rarely gives clients proof-based treatment systems, for example, those created from an intellectual social point of view
Clients with psychological instability are not being furnished with aptitudes which could help them deliberately lessen their passionate unsettling influence
Insufficiently funded and suboptimally supplied mental health services