​The number of new visits to psychiatric clinics in the Ministry of Health institutions in 2017 reached 16,619, according to the data released by the Centre on the eve of the World Mental Health Day, which is celebrated on October 10 every year.

Of the total visits to the psychiatric clinics in the institutions of the Ministry of Health in the country, 41.5% of visits were in Muscat governorate in 2017, reaching 6,902 patients, followed by Al-Batinah North governorate with 3,507 visits, which is 21.1%; and Musandam governorate with 1,449 visits, which is 8.7% of the total visits in the country.The number of visits in Al – Batinah South governorate reached 1,061. Dhofar had 844 visits, Adh Dhahirah had 759, Ash Sharqiah North had 681 visits and Ad-Dakhliyah had 652 visits. The number of visits in Ash Sharqiah South and Al-Buraymi was 467 and 297, respectively.

The World Mental Health Day is celebrated to increase public awareness on the issues of mental health. This provides an opportunity for more open discussions on the subject and investment in services for prevention of the problem.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ