¹Narayana Prasad MD, MPH, MS, ALM, ²Sloka Iyengar Ph.D. PMP, ³Hanifa M. Denny MPH, Ph.D.,
⁴Yasmine Aulia Gunawan M.Sc., ⁵Raviteja Innamuri DPM, MD, ⁶Sharad Phillip MD, ⁷Oluranti Samuel Dphil

¹Technical Director and co-founder of Public Health Literacy, Boston USA

²Scientist, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA

³Associate Professor of Public Health and Dean of Academic, students and Alumni Affairs, Diponegoro University, Indonesia

⁴Doctoral Student Department of Healthcare Administration, Major in Psychology, Asia University, Taiwan

⁵Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Government Medical College and General Hospital, Nizamabad, Telangana, India

⁶Consultant Psychiatrist, Mindful Rejuvenation Hospital and Mindful Kids Care Services, Kochi, Kerala, India

⁷Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Social sciences, Lagos state University, Nigeria

Objective:
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the physical, mental, and social well-being of millions of people across the globe. This paper will discuss the impact of COVID-19 on preexisting and emerging mental health issues amongst various subgroups of the vulnerable population in Southeast Asia.
Methods:
Qualitative review of existing knowledge on mental health issues during COVID-19 pandemic among migrant laborers, women and adolescents.
Conclusion:
Given the profound impact of COVID -19 beyond physical health, policy makers, scientific communities and faith-based institutions should make every effort to turn the COVID-19 crisis into an opportunity by developing a strong and robust consensus that is based on building public trust in partnership to provide societal mental health, which is an unappreciated asset of a nation. We conclude that while there is considerable amount of work in the field of mental health has been done, many efforts are siloed, and do not consider the unique cultural characteristics involved. In addition to providing ventilators and acute care to COVID-19 affected patients at the hospitals, we need to design policies to allocate resources for the post-pandemic burden on our communities and develop multi-disciplinary approaches. We suggest that these approaches should become routine in healthcare settings and should be appropriate to the individual’s cultural context. We argue that the generation of robust data, scientific evidence, and multi-disciplinary resources-sharing are required that would necessitate to produce the interventions that are culturally specific and scalable.

COVID 19, mental health, vulnerable population

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Volume 05 Issue 02 February 2022