Vikram Patel: Mental health for all by all

This TED talk was by Vikram Patel, on mental illnesses in the world and how they are not treated enough so Patel has developed a new approach. Vikram Patel helps bring better mental health care to low resource communities by teaching ordinary people to deliver basic psychiatric services.

Nearly 450 million people are affected by mental illness worldwide. In wealthy nations, just half receive appropriate care, but in developing countries, close to 90 percent go untreated because psychiatrists are in such short supply. Vikram Patel has outlined a highly promising  that he learned from observing how normal people can learn to treat ammonia and deliver babies. So now what he is doing is he is training members of communities to give mental health interventions, empowering ordinary people to care for others.

This is really interesting to me because i had no idea that so many people were affected by mental illness. I could have guessed by myself that the leading illness was depression but it is really astonishing and sad that people with mental illnesses are not treated in most parts of the world. That would suck to just be trapped there and not have any medical care for a condition. I think its a great thing that Vikram is training normal people in those places to help others because it is very affective and it probably just brings people together as a community.

The Story of Lucy

How human can a chimpanzee be? In 1964 Lucy, a female chimpanzee, was born. Lucy was part of an experiment to raise her as a human to see how human she could become. She was raised with a family and loved as a daughter. Lucy was taught sign language to communicate.  The results of this experiment were very positive and Lucy was actually very human. She would combine words to create new words for things that didn't have a name. Like she called watermelon candydrink. She could do a lot of things that humans do. When guests would come over she would make tea on the stove, She could make herself gin and tonic, and many other similar things. But when she got older she would tear everything apart and break everything because she became mature and really strong. So her family sent her back to the wild. It was really hard for Lucy to adjust to the wild and after she was in the wild for 2 years she was killed poachers. This was a really sad and interesting story and we learned a lot from it and realized how close we are to our chimpanzee brothers.