Keywords: Preventive approach,opportune cross-sectional research, seeking help for mental health problems

Aim:

Community mental health movements have as their objectives a change in the social context in which there is a greater risk of developing psychopathology. The existing network of state and private services of psychiatrists, psychotherapists of various educations, counseling centers for mental and spiritual health and self-help groups has recently been enriched with the service of mobile teams for the treatment of patients with severe mental disorders of the Andrija Štampar Teaching Institute. The question arises as to how we can change existing services to increase their efficiency.

Method:

The topic of our paper is an attempt to determine whether there is an increased need for intervention in the field of mental health in family medicine doctor's office before and after an opportune cross-sectional study. During 24 hours, we conducted two diagnostic tests on 32 volunteers who came to the family medicine office in random order. Sheehan anxiety scale of 35 questions and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) variant of the PRIME-MD test of 9 questions that the patient completes independently. The study included the number of patients who sought to talk to their doctor about mental health problems seven days earlier and seven days later than the study.

Results:

By counting the main diagnosis as the reason why the patient came to his doctor, we found that in the period before the survey, one or no patients came to the office daily for mental health problems as the first diagnosis, except on Christmas Eve, when three patients asked for help for mental health, which is the usual increase on that day, and after testing, 12 patients sought to talk about mental health problems.

Conclusions:

Although the sample is too small for statistical processing, it is multiple positive.