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Collaborative initiative commences to bolster mental health capacity

Mar 24, 2010 News

Through its collaboration with Dalhousie University of Canada and the Inter-American Development Bank, the Ministry of Health is poised to intensify its effort to further bolster its mental health capacity.
Characterised by a number of simultaneously held activities, the collaborative efforts were kicked into motion on Monday last and will continue until Sunday, according to Minister of Health Dr Leslie Ramsammy. And this move is essential, according to the Minister, since the World Health Organisation has deduced that mental health is not the same thing as the absence of a mental illness.
In essence, he explained that “How we feel about ourselves, the world and our lives is all part of mental health. When our mental health suffers, it can become difficult to enjoy life and we begin to feel run down mentally and physically.”
He said that many of these changes are known to get in the way of living a rewarding life, thus all people can benefit from learning how to enhance and protect mental health, whether or not they have experienced mental illness and/or substance abuse problems.
Minister Ramsammy explained that it was against this background that activities geared at building capacity to care for youths exposed to trauma and training of persons to deal with psychotic disorders and geriatric psychiatry have been engaged.
It was just last year that the Minister had disclosed that a paradigm shift looms within the public health sector as it relates to the way mental health services are offered to the general public. According to him, mental health programmes should be introduced as an everyday part of the local public health and social welfare programmes in Guyana.
He had sought to point out even then that thus far, mental health has been a peripheral part of the public health delivery services people have come to expect. However, he did note that they have become accustomed to merely accessing services as it relates to infectious diseases like HIV, malaria and dengue, as well as chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart diseases, and not that of mental health.
But while people have an expectation of support in terms of mental health, they however have no expectation that they could come for the regular services and obtain mental health assistance as well.
“We are changing that, and indeed in people’s mind and the policymakers’ mind, mental health belongs to a specialised service and there should be specialised personnel and so on. We want to change that paradigm – that is one of the pillars of the mental health strategies we have introduced.”
However, the Minister cautioned that in dealing with every mental health problem, the health Ministry cannot work alone, but instead requires multi-sector support.
He cited the Ministries of Education, Culture, Youth & Sport, Human Services and Education, along with the Religious bodies and Non-Governmental Organisations as entities that must support the Health Ministry’s efforts.
“With our various programmes we are able to enforce this idea,” the Minister stated, even as he emphasised that the introduction of Cognitive Behavioural Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS) is no less a health programme than the foot-care or HIV programmes.
In essence, CBITS, which represents a mental health programme which the ministry will eventually be unveiled countrywide and according to the minister will be, “part of the services that we want to provide to empower our families and communities”.
It is against this background that the Ministry has embraced plethora of initiatives which will boost its current efforts.

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