An estimated 5 million people in the Americas and Caribbean are affected. Mental and brain disorders are just a figment of one's imagination. They are real illnesses that cause suffering and disability. It's not just friends and family that fail to grasp the existence of a mental disorder. Some governments exclude mental health from health priorities and planning.
Mental disorders are real.
Mental illnesses and brain disorders provoke suffering, cause disability and can even shorten life as we see from episodes of depression after a heart attack, liver disease resulting from alcohol dependence or suicide. Every year it is estimated that one person commits suicide every 40 seconds. The existence of mental and brain disorders often remains hidden, voluntarily by the patient or simply unrecognized as a real illness by the person and their family. Yet the underlying abnormal substructure of many disorders has been identified by images of the brain. Thus to ignore their existence is akin to denying that cancer exists because we are unable to see the abnormal cells without a microscope.