Women need to have control of their lives in order to be physically and mentally healthy. Poverty, gender power relations, gender discrimination and violence against women as the main social determinants of women’s mental health have reduced this control and thus these factors need to be urgently addressed.
Central to women’s NGO work in Asia and the Pacific for the last two decades is the goal of improving women’s mental health and well-being . Based on the experience of the women’s movement and women NGOs’ provision of crisis services for women, women NGOs know that women suffer extensive abuse, suffering and unhappiness. These problems are unfortunately not adequately captured through the conventional indicators of the prevalence of mental health disabilities and disorders or overcome through the medical approach of drugs.
