Primary prevention in psychiatry: possibility or utopia?

• Autor(a) principal: Machado , Leonardo
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Souza, Camila Twany Nunes de, Cantilino, Amaury
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Debates em Psiquiatria (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistardp.org.br/revista/article/view/97
• topic: Prevenção primária; psiquiatria preventiva; Primary prevention; preventive psychiatry

Psychiatry is the branch of medicine that deals with the study of mental disorders with the aim of diagnosing, classifying, treating, and preventing such disorders. However, unlike other medical areas, thinking of preventive approaches in psychiatry is relatively new.Only in the 1970s did the first initiatives of prevention in mental health begin to be implemented. Early efforts focused on individuals at risk for psychosis. Over the past decades, major advances have been achieved in the field of secondary and tertiary prevention. However, would primary prevention be possible in psychiatry? Publications seem to say yes. About 1,000 controlled studies have been published on primary prevention in psychiatry, mostly involving children and adolescents. In general, these studies have demonstrated the ability of prevention approaches to reduce risk factors for mental illness, strengthen protective factors and generate a positive economic impact. Furthermore, although at a much lower scale, these studies have shown that preventive strategies are also able to decrease the incidence of common mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety disorders.