Steps forward in mental health

You may or may not know this, but Databank Foundation's main focus areas are Leadership Development (of which the YLMP is part) and Mental Health. I came across this post on the NGO News Africa blog which got me thinking about brain drain and its consequences. Here's an excerpt:

The issue of health in Africa is big news. Billions of dollars are spent annually, to fight diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, water-borne parasites and TB. These issues are rightly being targeted in efforts to improve the health of Africa, but one of the next challenges must be to change the attitudes regarding mental health across the continent. Psychiatrics is a specialism which African healthcare has tended to overlook.

In Ghana, government spending on mental health services represents just 3.9% of the total health budget (the equivalent figure in the UK is 12%). This funding is shared between Ghana’s three psychiatric hospitals, which are all clustered in the south of the country. There are only four psychiatrists currently practising in the public sector, all of whom are based in the south.

A serious lack of education also exists. A report published in the International Journal of Mental Health Systems found that 81% of community pharmacists in Ghana gave ‘inadequate education’ as their reason for not being involved in psychiatric treatment. Consequently, BasicNeeds, the foremost mental health NGO in Ghana, are working within a challenging environment.

BasicNeeds operates in the rural Northern regions of Ghana, and in the capital, Accra- where we visited the quarterly outreach programmes at Mamprobi and Kaneshi polyclinics. These clinics allow for outpatients to be reviewed and given medications, as well as providing an opportunity for new patients to see the psychiatric team for the first time. Demand for these services is high; when we visited the clinics, queues were long and resources stretched. Despite this pressure, we witnessed a careful approach being taken by staff, with a great deal of empathy and care being shown to each patient.

I find it phenomenal that there are only four practising psychiatrists in the whole of Ghana. As a psychology graduate, this news is particularly disturbing. Mental illness is as real as the flu or heart disease, and we need psychiatrists just as much as we need doctors or dentists. I sincerely hope our lack of adequate numbers of professionals in this area is not due to brain drain. If it is, we as a nation, from the government down to Kofi on the street, have some hard questions to ask ourselves.

You can read the rest of the article here.