LIBERIA HAS SCORED once more in its passage of the mental health bill to ward of the lingering disease.
THE BILL, PASSED by the House of Representatives on May 24, protects people living with mental orders from discrimination and will give access to quality mental healthcare in all 15 counties.
THE BILL, WHICH BECOMES law upon the President’s signature, also establishes, for the first time, oversight of mental health care through the Ministry of Health and creates a national advisory body on mental health issues.
THE MENTAL HEALTH Act also protects the property of people with mental health conditions.
MENTAL HEALTH IS quite a thorny issue in the country, with many overlooking it. Around the country, there are scores of people who are mentally afflicted but cannot get treatment due to sheer apathy from policymakers.
THERE ARE THOSE who also go through mental illness in silence. They also cannot get treatment because there are no pills, doctors or clinicians to handle this complicated disease and the country has still not found its niche when it comes to tackling mental health.
ANY COUNTRY COMING from destructive and brutal civil crises would have first ensured that mental health becomes an issue to tackle first, but that was not the case. And almost never to be so.
AS MANY AS ONE IN FIVE Liberians suffer a mild to moderate mental disorder, according to WHO estimates yet the country has only one registered psychiatrist and, until recently, the vast majority of health workers had a limited understanding of mental illness.
THE PASSAGE OF THE mental health bill to protect people with mental afflictions is commendable BUT, and a big one too must be taken with a pinch of salt.
FOR, HOW ELSE CAN we protect mentally health people from themselves, the sane but traumatize society and from those who are not mentally afflicted? To protect mentally afflicted people from the society means they have to be placed in mental homes and operated by trained clinicians.
A FEW YEARS AGO, a famous mentally afflicted man known as “Forum” passed. His funeral led to a public outcry to salvage those whose minds are lost. His death saw the attendance of many of his “friends” who are/were officials of the government.
LOFTY PROMISES WERE made to rebuild the Katherine Mills Rehabilitation Center which had been closed since the inception of the civil war. But what and where have those lofty promises amounted to?
WHERE ARE THE MENTAL homes to keep the mentally ill out of the streets so that they are protected and don’t pose a danger to themselves and others?
TWO YEARS AGO, a FrontPage Africa editor in Accra fled to safety when a mentally ill man attacked a little boy with an iron. Many others on the scene also fled for fear of being attacked also.
ANOTHER THING IN the mental health bill which also caught our attention was the placement of oversight to the Ministry of Health. Can this ministry really handle this role when it has already washed its hands of social issues like Pontius Pilate by transferring its social component to the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection?
INSTITUTIONS SUCH as the Carter Center has done much more than the Ministry of Health to tackle mental health, increasing the number of psychiatrists to two and training of over 200 clinicians. Ebola has exposed
BUT ALL OF THIS would be meaningless and lost if we cannot do the barest minimum of reopening Katherine Mills, the first step to salvaging Liberia’s lost and wandering minds.