Good mental health care will benefit all — Chief Psychiatrist

THE Chief Psychiatrist, Dr Akwasi Osei, has urged people in position to effect changes in mental health care to do so since the general public stands to gain when there are better services.
He said since every individual stood the risk of suffering from one mental illness or another in a lifetime, there was the need for the country to put in place good services for the benefit of the people.
“Mental disorders such as depression and dementia in old age are common illnesses which can affect anybody,” he stated.
Dr Osei made the observation when he presented a paper at a day’s workshop for journalists in Accra on the State of the Mental Health Bill in Ghana. The workshop was organised by BasicNeeds, an international non-governmental organisation(NGO) that deals with people affected with mental illness.
The Chief Psychiatrist said the passage of the bill would equip the country to put in place better treatment conditions for a disease which could affect each individual either directly or indirectly because the bill allowed the sector to be autonomous under a proposed Mental Health Authority.
He stated that mental illness was an everyday occurrence and noted that apart from the extreme form of mental disorder, which many people wrongly refereed to as madness, there were minor ones which affected people on daily basis and also needed to be treated.
He mentioned some of the cases as depression, mania, phobia (extreme fear), dementia, psychosis and schizophrenia.
He said the bill, whose drafting began in 2004, had gone through 10 different drafts and pointed out that the bill had been described as a model bill by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which was waiting for its passage to use as a standard bill for other countries.
Speaking on the “Justification for Mental Health Authority”, a retired Chief Psychiatrist, Dr J.B. Asare, said the new mental bill sought to improve the care of mentally ill patients in the country and also could address human rights abuses by those who had mental patients under their care.
He stressed that the bill, when passed, would in addition address decentralisation of mental health care and cover mental health care at the community and in the spiritual and traditional setting, a situation, he pointed out, would pave the way for supervision and revision of the care practices.
Dr Asare said the bill had delayed because there was lack of interest on the part of policy makers in mental health issues and called for change of attitude since a good mental health care practice was good for every country.
A Health Management Consultant, Dr Kofi Ahmed, described mental disorder or mental illness “as a psychological or behavioural pattern that occurs in an individual and is thought to cause distress or disability that is not expected as part of normal development or culture”.
Based on that description, Dr Ahmed said each person could suffer from mental illness and urged all to have interest in the issue.
A representative of the Human Rights Advocacy Centre (HRAC), Ms Maria Amanor-Akrofi, observed that people with mental disabilities experienced some of the harshest conditions of living that existed in any society.
She stated that the hardships were caused by discrimination and the absence of legal protections against improper and abusive treatment, which makes mental health a human rights concern.
The chairperson for the occasion, who is also the Director of Legal Drafting Department at the Attorney General’s Department, Mrs Estella Appiah, urged the various advocacy groups to continue to lobby policy makers to get the bill passed, since a lot of work had gone into it.