In its industrialisation, its standard of living and the extent of formal education, but also in its patterns of disease, Trinidad resembles Western Europe. Two admissions per year for malaria to the Port-of-Spain General Hospital and four for leprosy contrast with 1,158 for diabetes which, with vascular disease and cancer, accounts for nearly three-quarters of all deaths in adults, a pattern of mortality similar to those of other industrialised countries.

Psychiatric care was traditionally provided in the large mental hospital at St Ann's, built in the nineteenth century beyond the northern suburbs of Port-of-Spain. For its population, Trinidad had a relatively large mental health staff by the early nineteen-eighties – 24 doctors (out of a total of over 1,000), plus social workers, psychologists, occupational therapists, and more than 600 nursing staff. Over the last twenty years psychiatric services have slowly moved into smaller local facilities and there are three general hospital psychiatric units; out-patient and children's clinics; and an alcoholism treatment centre. Many Trinidadian psychiatrists have trained in Britain and this policy closely follows the contemporary British model: a predominantly biological explanation of psychopathology involving a ‘community-based’ pattern of services to avoid ‘institutionalisation’, with nurses visiting patients at home, programmes of public education and the establishment of day centres and workshops. As in Britain, the ‘deinstitutionalisation’ of St Ann's has met with a rather mixed public response and the press carries periodic complaints that patients are being discharged from hospital to sleep in the streets.