The growing burden of untreated mental disorders in the world’s two most populous countries, India and China, cannot be adequately addressed without changes to their health care systems and by training folk healers to become collaborators, a new report has found.

The analysis, published as a part of a series in the journals The Lancet and The Lancet Psychiatry, draws on years of medical surveys in those countries. It represents the latest effort by an international coalition of researchers to put mental health care at the center of the global health agenda; last month, the World Bank and the World Health Organization convened hundreds of public officials, doctors and other specialists in a landmark meeting in Washington to focus attention on global mental health.

The new research, presented in three papers, found that less than 10 percent of people in India and China with a mental disorder received effective treatment, and that the resulting burden of disability from those two countries was higher than in all Western countries combined.

“India and China together represent more than a third of the world’s population, and both countries are at a remarkable stage of epidemiologic and demographic transition,” said a co-author of one of the papers, Dr. Vikram Patel, a professor of international mental health and co-founder of a community-based mental health center, Sangath, in Goa State in India, in a recorded interview accompanying the articles.