Globally, inadequate mental health care provider to service user ratios contextualized the pre-pandemic mental health care as noted in the WHO Mental Health Atlas 2017. The global average of psychiatrists per 100,000 population is 9. The ratio was 1.6 for low-income countries, 6.2 for middle-income countries, and 71.7 for high-income countries (World Health Organization [WHO], 2018). The gross disparities between high, middle, and low-income settings further compound the situation. Other factors such as geographical, financial, and social access further incapacitate mental healthcare provisions in low-and middleincome countries. Mental healthcare providers are inadequately remunerated and stigmatized in such settings, leading to a ‘brain drain’to high-income settings and contributing to the human resource shortfall (Kilic et al., 2019; Rathod et al., 2017). Budgetary allocation for mental healthcare provisions has been chronically underfunded (WHO, 2018). Allocating enough financial resources to mental health is a necessary precondition for developing quality mental health systems with enough human resources to run the services and provide adequate support to meet people’s needs. However, mental health and wellbeing cannot be addressed only by increasing resources. Indeed, the majority of existing funding continues to be invested in the renovation and expansion of residential psychiatric and social care institutions, which are often associated with social exclusion and a wide range of human rights violations. In low-and middle-income countries, the budget allocated for institutional care represents over 80% of the total government expenditure on mental health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the already existing gap in mental health and made the situation worse for people with mental illness. Furthermore, on the population level, its adverse psychological effects have led to an increased demand for mental health services which are disrupted as providers are deployed elsewhere. The disruption in mental health services has been noted in almost all countries (WHO, 2020). Policymakers, administrators, and health officials have reallocated mental health care resources, especially human resources, to acute care services, which are thought to be ‘more important’. Such policy decisions would not be the best public health measure as they do not account for the care needs of large swathes of the populations such as SARS-CoV-2 survivors and affected family members. To a large extent, their care needs can be met by adequately trained mental health professionals.