Psychiatry and primary care

Abstract

There is now almost universal recognition that primary care is the place where most mentally distressed people first present for help. However, the pace at which the health system has adapted to this reality varies greatly from country to country, depending on the amount of resource devoted to mental illness services, the way in which primary care physicians have organized their practice, and the inertia of the system. Here we present several models from developed and developing countries and address briefly the issue of training of health workers.