PBS Newshour’s global health unit on Monday began a four-part series examining major health challenges in Indonesia, which “sheds light on the diverse nation’s changing political landscape, deplorable conditions for people there with severe mental illness, the effect of rising food prices and research into a plant that could be used as a male contraceptive,” the Newshour’s “The Rundown” blog states. The blog links to other video, photo and written reports from the team, including a piece on an Indonesian law that encourages breastfeeding (Miller, 7/14).

In the first of the reports, Ray Suarez reports how “[a] shortage of health workers, lack of treatment options and widespread misconceptions about psychological disorders often leads to poor and inhuman treatment of mentally ill patients in Indonesia” (7/18).