Facilitate Mental Health Bill (Spread)

BasicNeeds, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which cares for people affected with mental health, has urged the government to treat the Mental Health Bill separately and to also facilitate its passage.
It said it was rather unfortunate for the bill, which was sent to Parliament in 2008 had to wait until a whole new bill had been made to include other areas of health delivery.
The Country Programme Manager of BasicNeeds, Mr Peter Yaro, said there was the need for the government to consider the bill as soon as possible, since it had been dealt with adequately to satisfy the standard required by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
He said when passed into law, the document could provide the legal backing to ensure the provision of adequate resources for the care of mental health patients in the country.
Mr Yaro said these in Accra yesterday after the opening ceremony of a three-day training on the theme: “Training of Mental Health Self-Help Groups on the Local Government System and Decentralisation in Ghana”.
Participants in the programme, which was sponsored by the European Union (EU), were made up of mental health patients whose conditions had stabilised as well as those of their care givers.
Mr Yaro, however, expressed regret that there were only three public psychiatric hospitals in the country and described the figure as woefully inadequate to serve the needs of the whole population.
He said BasicNeeds took it upon itself to organise the three-day training for the affected individuals to equip them with the requisite knowledge to enable them to fight for their needs, especially at the community level.
February 25, 2009)

He pointed out that in spite of the many civil society groups who advocated on behalf of vulnerable groups such as women, children and the physically challenged, issues of mental health were usually left untouched.
“That is the more reason why those who are affected should be trained in order to enable them to do things for themselves,” he stated.
Mr Yaro said one issue that had affected mental health patients was stigmatisation, and explained that with the introduction of community-based health care by the WHO, that situation could be minimised as people in the community would be witnesses to the improvement of the patients as they received treatment and, therefore, accept them as cured.
For his part, the Project Research Officer of BasicNeeds, Mr Evans Oheneba-Mensah, told the Daily Graphic that mental illness involved various types of diseases which affected the brain, and mentioned psychosis, epilepsy and depression, among others.
He said with the help of other institutions, both locally and internationally, BasicNeeds was caring for about 1,530 patients and their care givers in the Accra metropolis alone.
Mr Oheneba-Mensah said the assistance was in the area of treatment, organisation of meetings to enable them to interact and share experiences and provide financial assistance as well support them to earn a living in various vocations.