Mental health: scarce resources need new paradigms.

Mental disorders represent a major challenge to global development worldwide. Effective (and in some cases cost-effective) interventions are available for almost all of them. However, these interventions are often not implemented. Unknown variables, quite similar among themselves across the world, can have a strong influence in increasing the service quality in spite of the differences in resources and technologies. These unknown variables often result from the adoption of paradigms which are relatively independent from resources and technologies. We examine here four such paradigms.