Mental Health is everybody’s business – CMO

Nov 01, 2015 News

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By Romila Boodram

Five years ago, Nadine Gomes anxiously awaited each text and call. Still, her stomach turned every time her phone would ring or vibrate and every time there was a knock at the door.
Sometimes, she would even turn her phone off at night– the fear of getting that life-altering news too much to bear.
She lived with that terror for a week as her beloved son, Terry Gomes, a boy whom she says “played cricket, wrote poems and told his mother endlessly how much he loved her,” disappeared.
He struggled with mental illness for more than two months.

In January 2010, after Terry had gone missing for about a week, her phone rang. A Police Corporal was at the other end of the line. She immediately called out to her husband to share the call.
“I never wanted to be alone to find out whether something happened to Terry,” she said during a recent Skype interview from her home in Queens, New York where she moved two years ago.
It was the call she feared the most. Terry, just 18 was gone. He had drowned in a trench at Plaisance, East Coast Demerara (ECD), she learned.
Her life, like the lives of parents too numerous to count who have also lost children to mental illness, was forever changed. Terry was her only child.
According to the mother, Terry was just a happy child but this gradually started to change when he met his first girlfriend.
“He was happy. They went out like any other young couple. They dated for about a year and then he found out that she had another life on the internet. One day he went by her and she wasn’t at home so her mother let him in the house,” Gomes recalled.
She added that her son asked to use his girlfriend’s computer and when he logged on there were all these messages from a guy in New York. There were abortion messages, marriage messages and vacation messages.
Gomes said that her son then found out his girlfriend of one year was actually a married woman. “While her papers were being processed, she was having an affair with my son and he had no idea.”

According to the mother, her son stopped eating; he stayed at home all the time and listened to very loud rock music. “In the nights he would cry. He hardly came out of his room. We tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t let us in. I had no idea what to do. My son was depressed.”
She said that this behaviour continued for four months. “I took him to a clinic in the village and they said that they had no social worker or psychiatrist to help. I sat and cried. I was losing my son and I didn’t know what else to do.
Terry later disappeared from home and his mother was subsequently informed that he had drowned.
Terry Gomes’s death has exposed the lack of a proper mental health care in Guyana. He had no access to social workers and there is no department which deals primarily with counseling.
Also, the sudden passing of Human Rights and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) activist, Zenita Nicholson, by way of a suicide has also reminded us of the significant gap that exists in our mental health system.
At present, Guyana has at least five doctors who deal with mental health in the country. All are based in Georgetown and at the New Amsterdam Psychiatric hospital.
However, the country has 10 Administrative regions. This means that at least eight regions in Guyana do not have access to psychiatrists.
Anthony Autar, Managing Director of the Guyana Foundation, a Non-Governmental Organization said that Zenita’s death has shown that even the caregivers need care and support.
“The needs, locally, are so vast that often times those involved in counseling/advocacy are overburdened and unable to invest in the self care needed to maintain balance and deal with personal life challenges,” Autar said.
Social workers at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) explained that there is indeed a need for a mental health department.
“At least every region must have access to a mental health department where persons can go and be counseled. If not a psychiatrist, there must be social workers to help people. Mental illness cannot be seen, it is mental illness. Some people aren’t open about their illness but we must look out for the signs,” a social worker said.
Acting Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jeetendra Mohanlall, explained that mental health is everybody’s business and people should pay attention to any changes in their loved ones’ behaviour.
He said that the Ministry of Public Health is doing a lot of work to develop this area.
“As we move forward, the demand will be more but this is an area we are working on continuously,” Mohanlall stressed.
While the acting CMO has acknowledged that there is indeed a lack of adequately trained professionals in this field, he said that the ministry is encouraging young doctors to make a career out of mental health.
The most commonly diagnosed mental illness in Guyana is schizophrenia. In 2008, the suicide rate for males was 33.8 per 100,000 people, while for females it was 11.6 per 100,000 people.
Neuropsychiatric disorders contributed an estimated 13 per cent of the global burden of disease in 2008.

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