Health care will undoubtedly change over the next 20 or 30 years as eHealth technologies become increasingly used and accepted (Treister, 1997; Yellowlees, 1997, 2001). At a global level, the health care system is moving away from episodic care to concentrating on continuity of care, especially for patients with chronic diseases (Yack, 2000), who will give rise to the greatest disease burden in the future (Murray & Lopez, 1999). Many countries are gradually moving away from a focus on the service provider to a focus on the informed patient, and from an individual approach to treatment to a team approach. Increasingly there is a concern less with the treatment of illness and more with the need for wellness promotion and illness prevention, which, of course, parallels a shift away from traditional care to community care.

Using a census-based prevalence survey (Jablensky et al, 2000), we estimated the cost of psychosis in urban Australia at AU$2.25 billion (£0.86 billion) per year when valued at prices pertaining in the year 2000 (Carr et al, 2003). About 40% of these costs were spent on direct mental health care, the remainder being the costs of lost productivity (limited to unemployment in our study). The total costs amounted to AU$46 200 (£17 722) per person per year, 20% higher than the average annual male income. The bulk of the treatment cost was accounted for by in-patient care, which appeared to have become the default option in the absence of adequate levels of supported community accommodation. This was indicated by the fact that after ‘non-discretionary’ treatment costs (42% of direct costs) were accounted for (i.e. visits to a general practitioner, medication, crisis or emergency care, acute hospitalisation), almost three-quarters of the remainder was spent on long-stay hospitalisation (Neil et al, 2003). When patterns of community-based service delivery were examined, we found a marked paucity of delivery of psychosocial treatments, rehabilitation and substance use interventions, reflecting the skewing of expenditure towards long-term hospitalisation and away from community care.

A news release from the World Health Organization (2003) suggested that a mere 10% of global health research is devoted to diseases that account for 90% of the global disease burden. While this comment refers primarily to research into infectious and parasitic diseases, a similar trend may well be true for psychiatry, taken from a global perspective. A cursory glance at recent issues of World Psychiatry, the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association, will reveal articles describing recent advances in antidepressant treatment and other pharmacotherapies, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, personality disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the genetics of mental illness. These topics are obviously important and the field cannot advance without such cutting-edge research. Most of the authors are, as expected, psychiatrists living and working in Western Europe or North America. This is also, of course, acceptable and important. The dissemination of scientific data is essential for advancing the field, and researchers who live and work in Europe and North America are generally the most qualified to do so. So, what's the problem?

In the United States, the patient has emerged as the central focus in evaluations of mental health services (Buckley, 1993). Whereas evaluation research in the 1980s emphasised the structure and process of mental health care, current evaluation research incorporates client-based measurements of treatment outcomes, such as symptom reduction, functional status and quality of life (Chisholm et al, 1997; Campbell, 1998). In addition, patient satisfaction with mental health services is increasingly used as an outcome dimension and an indicator of service quality (Center for Mental Health Services, 1996; Teague et al, 1997; Howard et al, 2003).

Videoconferencing has increased patient access to psychiatric care by linking specialists at academic or regional health centres with primary health care professionals in shortage areas (Hilty et al, 1999, 2002). Preliminary studies have demonstrated positive outcomes and user satisfaction (Hilty et al, 2002). Information is still being sought regarding costs because of a paucity of clinical outcome studies, cost data and randomised trials.

Cultural psychiatry as a clinical specialty sprung mainly from Europe and North America, in order to respond to growing concerns of ethnic minorities in high-income countries. Academic psychiatrists pursuing comparative international studies on mental health, together with medical anthropologists conducting clinical ethnographies, contributed to its theoretical basis (Kleinman, 1987; Littlewood, 1990). What at first appeared to be a marginal specialty is no longer so. For example, the UK alone has witnessed a steady growth of the field, as evidenced by its mandatory inclusion in mental health training curricula, and the existence of several taught masters courses, academic positions in universities and three dedicated journals, as well as, more recently, lead papers in mainstream publications that have debated the cultural position of ‘biology’ itself (Timimi & Taylor, 2004). Additionally, with a proliferation of clinical jobs for ‘ethnic minority’ services in hospital trusts across the country, there is ample scope for employment. The overall evidence indicates that ‘cultural psychiatry’ in the UK is now a specialty in its own right.

Unfortunately, terrorism, violence and other acute adverse life events have become a world-wide problem. There is no country today that is protected from these phenomena and people can no longer feel safe anywhere. This new situation has increased both the scientific interest in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the amount of research conducted on this issue.

Changes in the Polish health care system, introduced by a Parliamentary Act in 1999, resulted from an urgent need for a more effective provision of health services, which were held in poor esteem by the public. Public expenditure on health care at the time of the reform was equivalent to 4.19% of gross national product, or US$363 at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita. This amount was considerably lower than in the most developed countries (i.e. members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD). The reformers’ main modification consisted of replacing state financing of health services with insurance-based financing. Statutory health insurance covers 99.4% of Poland's 38.2 million citizens. The insurance fee is to be increased from 7.0% of personal income at the beginning of the reforms to 9.0% (at present it has reached 8.25%). The aim was also to achieve relatively stable health care expenditure, independent of the annual political budget allocation. A special administrator was appointed for the Sickness or National Health Fund and was authorised to contract for health services. These market-oriented developments were paralleled by the implementation of special programmes, financed from the Ministry of Health budget, which were aimed at restructuring health care facilities.

The consequences of terrorism, wars and natural disasters are a challenge to the psychiatric profession. The large numbers of people estimated to have mental health problems surpass the capacities of existing mental health services, whether modern or traditional. The bulk of the 35 million refugees and internally displaced people worldwide reside in countries that, on average, have less than one psychiatrist or psychologist per 100 000 people (WHO, 2001). Even the 500 000 people estimated to need some form of psychological support after the attack in New York on 11 September 2001 exceeded the service capacity, despite the fact that New York has the highest density of mental health professionals in the world (Herman & Susser, this issue, pp. 2–4). Elsewhere, many survivors of various types of disaster reside in peripheral areas of countries and are not covered by modern mental health services.

Over the past few decades, health care as a whole and psychiatry specifically have evolved as a result of various societal influences. Quality assurance, evidence-based treatment and patients’ satisfaction with care are all examples of such trends. In Sweden, the patients’ satisfaction with care has become the concern both of researchers and of mental health care administrators. This may be a result of changed social norms and of the relatively recent apprehension of patients’ wish to participate in their own health care.

Jordan, one of the most recently established countries in the Middle East, was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was declared a political entity known as Transjordan under the mandate of the British government in 1923, until it gained independence and was declared a Kingdom in 1946. In 1950, Transjordan and the West Bank were united and assumed the current name of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The next major change for the Kingdom came in 1967, when the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israeli forces caused a massive influx of migrants to the East Bank.

The international community has been slow to appreciate the growing problem of the participation of armed children and youths in non-political disputes, encountered in both developed and developing countries, from Haiti to Northern Ireland. While there is widespread recognition of the issue of ‘child soldiers’ (e.g. www.childsoldiers.org/) there are also many children who participate in organised armed groups that function outside traditionally defined war zones. Nowhere is this issue more acute than in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There may be more people (and specifically children) dying from small-arms fire in Rio de Janeiro than in many armed conflicts elsewhere. Most are bound up in the relentless conflicts involving factions of drugs traffickers fighting within and between Rio's favelas, or shanty towns, and their burgeoning drugs trade.

Many psychologically informed books and papers have been published during the past 30 years that have explored different elements of the Northern Ireland problem. These have ranged from Padraig O'Malley's (1990) fascinating examination of the world of the hunger strikers and their families, to a recent socio-psychological study of sectarianism in young children, which was sponsored by the Community Relations Council (Connolly et al, 2002). The latter careful piece of work demonstrated that while children of three years of age are beginning to identify different cultural symbols, there is not much evidence of sectarian attitudes until about five or six years of age. By this time they have not only begun to recognise and identify with partisan symbols, but also to express deeply antagonistic sectarian attitudes. These are not wholly unexpected findings, but the purpose of good research is to enquire whether things are in fact the way one might expect them to be. When it comes to research on clinical psychiatry there is less material but the most interesting and unexpected finding that emerges from the published work of psychiatrists in Northern Ireland is the limited evidence of any increased violence-related psychiatric illness in the population as a whole.

Telepsychiatry, the use of videoconferencing in mental health care, has been piloted in European settings as diverse as northern Norway and inner London. These studies have been initiated to improve access to services and have been limited in scale. Nevertheless, some common themes have emerged.

The Philippines, known as the Pearl of the Orient, is an archipelago of 7107 islands, bounded on the west by the South China Sea, on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Sulu and Celebes Sea, and on the north by the Bashi Channel. The northernmost islands are about 240 km south of Taiwan and the southernmost islands approximately 24 km from Borneo. The country has a total land area of some 300 000 km2. It is divided into three geographical areas: Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. It has 17 regions, 79 provinces, 115 cities, 1495 municipalities and 41 956 barangays (the smallest geographic and political unit). It has over 100 ethnic groups and a myriad of foreign influences (including Malay, Chinese, Spanish and American).

Bermuda comprises a group of small islands in the Atlantic Ocean, situated approximately 1000 km east of the USA. It is a self-governing crown dependency of the UK. It is the third richest country in the world, with average wages per head of US$41 495 in 2000. Its economy is based on a flourishing offshore insurance industry and tourism.

Pakistan is a country comprising four provinces: Punjab, Sind, Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan, in addition to the federally administered tribal areas and the federal capital territory of Islamabad. It is bordered by China, Afghanistan, Iran and India. It has a population of 152 million (excluding an estimated 3–4 million Afghan and Bangladeshi immigrants) and an area of 796 095 km2.

How many members of the College know about the state of psychiatry in Nigeria or Egypt? Perhaps just a few. How many would be interested in knowing more? Perhaps many. The country profiles section of International Psychiatry attempts to narrow this information-and-awareness gap.

Country profiles provide summary information on mental health policy, services, training and research in the country, along with key references for more details. The aim is to give a bird's eye view of the situation within about 1500 words. It is hoped that this will not only increase the reader's awareness of distant and often forgotten countries, but also provide an opportunity for learning from others’ experiences. The profiles can also open possibilities for further dialogue and even collaboration.