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The mentally ill among us

Jun 30, 2014 Editorial

In this day and age there are many medical conditions that doctors diagnose and even treat. Some of these medical conditions are indiscernible to the eye but they are present. One of them is mental illness. Like any country. Guyana has more than its fair share of mentally ill people. The problem is that these people are allowed to roam or simply to live their lives without any help from the medical system.
One of the medical conditions that is perhaps more common than any other is depression. Until recently, this was not considered a mental health problem in this country. The result was that the casual observer would conclude that the depressed person is “moody.”  And people always left the moody person to themselves until they “snapped out of it.”
Today we see that people in the developed world pay a lot of attention to the “moody” person because these are the people who have the capability to wreak havoc. These are the people who blame the society for their state of depression and they sometimes lash out.
Not so long ago we had the case of the boy who shot his mother to death and then turned his gun on the school he once attended, killing more than a dozen children and teachers. The mother recognized that her son had a mental problem so she kept him at home and taught him.
These days, people find their psychiatrists with alacrity because they are now familiar with the symptoms and they know all about the effects. They also know that they could be treated, that they no longer need to lock themselves away until the episode passes, if it ever does.
There are other mental health problems such as autism, attention deficit disorder and the more common mental disorders such as psychosis, dementia, schizophrenia and paranoia. Each of these is treatable but for the most part in Guyana, they go unrecognized or the people close to the patient would simply conclude that “he head ain’t good”.
During the colonial period before these days of advanced treatment, the authorities simply locked these people away. Treatments are not as drastic as they were then but we seem to be paying less attention to these mental disorders.
For one, we have not concentrated on training people to deal with mental illnesses.  There are two known psychiatrists in Guyana and no more than three psychiatric nurses.  From time to time the Government facility would secure a psychiatrist, courtesy of the Cuban Government. In the case of the latter the language problem is often a barrier.
People would easily spot the chronic schizophrenics. Some of them have been known to attack people on the streets; some have been killed under weird circumstances and others simply move from garbage bin to garbage bin eating anything on offer.
But there is one mental illness that is mostly unnoticed and it is autism. At least one in five Guyanese has autism in some form or the other. There is no physical manifestation but the patient would actually display some form of social impediment.
Many have problems expressing themselves; they are all gifted in one form or the other except that we do not spend time to ascertain the gift of this child; and there is no special school for such people. We send them to public schools where they fail to cope with their more adjusted peers.
Very few, if any, ever sought medical attention for the autistic child who more often than not, is lost in his own world. Yesterday, Guyana observed what is called World Autism Day, a day when the nation was expected to focus on autism. Sadly, the day passed largely ignored. The people who have banded themselves to help autistic persons have been talking to the wind.
In this country it is expected that the government would undertake certain steps to help deal with some of the issues in society. From all observation, there is nothing in place for the autistic child. A few parents of these children would meet and resolve to deal with their problem. They get no money from any source.
For them, their problem is theirs just as the other mental health problems remain largely individualized.

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