Nice work! I’m not a mental health professional, but you seem to have covered the important topics—what is the scope, what is the burden and prevalence of different subcategories, and what is the state of the mental health care. The report was comprehensible for me and I felt it communicated the main points well.
One thing I was missing is putting the numbers in context—interpreting absolute numbers to get a sense of relative importance can be difficult. For instance, how does the burden of 2 million DALYs compare to the total disease burden in Philippines? How does the percentage of DOH budget or workforce per 100,000 compare to other countries or some other baseline health cause? Or maybe how does it compare to other areas of EA interest? Depending on your audience, contrasting with appropriate baseline or the desired state can be helpful.
If you would like to study this area further, the obvious advice is to talk to professionals that may be familiar with the bottlenecks, low-hanging fruits and such (if you haven’t done that already). If you manage to identify some concrete intervention opportunities, it could help you make your results comparable to other opportunities EA Philippines can contribute to (I like Charity Entrepreneurship research process as inspiration).
As it happens, I’ve recently witnessed a new volunteer mental health project in Czechia and I liked the way they set it up—they reached out to nonprofits working in this area (also to the DOH and some researchers, with somewhat less success) and conducted a lightweight qualitative research. This helped them determine their focus (providing accessible information to young people and teenagers).
Thank you for taking the time to read our paper and share your feedback on our work! Right now, we are working to compare the total DALYs from MHDSCs to the total DALYs from all the diseases included in the GBD. We may also include more baselines to compare the scale and neglectedness of mental health in the Philippines to that of other countries/causes.
I also appreciate your input on the further work that we can do. For the next phase of our research, we may focus on describing (and maybe evaluating) existing interventions/projects/organizations that aim to alleviate the burden of MHDSCs in the country. We will definitely be using Charity Entrepreneurship’s research process and the input of mental health professionals as an inspiration and/or guide to this further research.
Regarding the mental health project that you witnessed, I am interested in reading about their process and progress! Would you happen to know if such a writeup exists and if it does, if this writeup is available for public viewing?
Nice work! I’m not a mental health professional, but you seem to have covered the important topics—what is the scope, what is the burden and prevalence of different subcategories, and what is the state of the mental health care. The report was comprehensible for me and I felt it communicated the main points well.
One thing I was missing is putting the numbers in context—interpreting absolute numbers to get a sense of relative importance can be difficult. For instance, how does the burden of 2 million DALYs compare to the total disease burden in Philippines? How does the percentage of DOH budget or workforce per 100,000 compare to other countries or some other baseline health cause? Or maybe how does it compare to other areas of EA interest? Depending on your audience, contrasting with appropriate baseline or the desired state can be helpful.
If you would like to study this area further, the obvious advice is to talk to professionals that may be familiar with the bottlenecks, low-hanging fruits and such (if you haven’t done that already). If you manage to identify some concrete intervention opportunities, it could help you make your results comparable to other opportunities EA Philippines can contribute to (I like Charity Entrepreneurship research process as inspiration).
As it happens, I’ve recently witnessed a new volunteer mental health project in Czechia and I liked the way they set it up—they reached out to nonprofits working in this area (also to the DOH and some researchers, with somewhat less success) and conducted a lightweight qualitative research. This helped them determine their focus (providing accessible information to young people and teenagers).
Thank you for taking the time to read our paper and share your feedback on our work! Right now, we are working to compare the total DALYs from MHDSCs to the total DALYs from all the diseases included in the GBD. We may also include more baselines to compare the scale and neglectedness of mental health in the Philippines to that of other countries/causes.
I also appreciate your input on the further work that we can do. For the next phase of our research, we may focus on describing (and maybe evaluating) existing interventions/projects/organizations that aim to alleviate the burden of MHDSCs in the country. We will definitely be using Charity Entrepreneurship’s research process and the input of mental health professionals as an inspiration and/or guide to this further research.
Regarding the mental health project that you witnessed, I am interested in reading about their process and progress! Would you happen to know if such a writeup exists and if it does, if this writeup is available for public viewing?
Materials on the project are public, but they are in Czech only, unfortunately. I’ll send you a private message.