In the first study in the Arab world to document mental illness and treatment on a national level, researchers from Lebanon have described the prevalence of mental disorders and their relation to exposure to war.
Elie Karam and colleagues, who publish their study in the open access journal PLoS Medicine this week, used a World Health Organization (WHO) interview tool to diagnose mental health disorders in a sample of 3,000 adults in Lebanon representative of the population. They investigated the question of lifetime prevalence (the proportion of Lebanese who have a mental disorder at some point in their lives) and the age of onset of mental disorders, as well as the delay they experienced in receiving treatment. This kind of information is necessary to ensure that states provide efficient mental-health services to their populations, particularly outside of industrialized countries where mental disorders are less researched. They also asked each participant in the study about their experience of traumatic events relating to war, including whether they had been a refugee (38 % of people in the study), a civilian in a war zone (55%), or witnessed death or injury (18%). Although the relationship between war and the mental health of people serving in the military has been described before, this is the first time that a nationally representative study has assessed the effect of war on the first onset of mental disorders in a civilian population.