Mental health and social changes, deliberate self-harm admissions as an index

MENA Dubai 2003 Abstract

Author Omar Al-Modayfer
Copy The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the vastly developing countries which has made this growing nation to change from a traditional society which have set beliefs and practices of various social, religious and general way of living to an open country with multiple challenges to the believe and practice of the society. Mental health especially in adolescents has been known to be vulnerable to many factors including the social changes and a wide variety of changes in all aspects of living. While traditional societies have been known to have excellent psychological and social coping mechanisms within its structure, it has been well observed that these mechanisms do fail when the homeostasis of the society has been challenged. In this paper we use the increasing of the deliberate self harm admissions to KFNGH in Riyadh over 10 years which went up by 500% between 1990 till 1999 as index to point the need to increase the quantity and quality of mental health services in the kingdom to face this crisis, while proposing the social change factors; we discuss adolescent mental health within the same framework because a significant group of the subjects admitted were adolescents.