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Authorities must consult more widely on matters of national importance

Nov 26, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – The Guyana Foundation believes that the human resources of Guyana constitute the country’s most valuable asset. Therefore, we have to do everything within our power to develop it, to protect it, and to ensure that all people can live long productive lives with dignity and in unity.
Guyana Foundation launched one of the first and largest privately funded mental health initiatives in the country.
The number of people ending their lives by suicide caused the World Health Organization to publish in its report a few years ago that 44.2 per 100,000 people ended their lives by suicide. At one point, Guyana had the highest rate of suicide in the world as we have all become aware. We have dropped from that position but not enough.
In 2013, Guyana Foundation sponsored Serena Coultress, of Maastricht University, to look into the causes of suicide in Guyana.
It is based on her findings and guidance that we shifted gears from being a purely charitable organisation based in the Capital City, to establishing a permanent presence in the regions.
We opened our first Sunrise Centre in 2016 in Essequibo. The centre was so named with the hope that our work to offer free mental health counselling, mentorship, vocational skills training, and village renewal projects would cause people to want to live to see another sunrise.
We invested in training our core team in counselling. We offered mental health workshops to sensitise the population, conducted by Guyanese Canadian mental health professional, Dr. Latchman Narain, a registered member of the Ontario Association of Consultants, Counsellors, Psychometrics and Psychotherapists (OACCPP) and holds a master’s degree as well as a Doctorate Degree in Counselling Psychology. Dr. Narain also runs the Anger Management Centre of Toronto Inc.
In addition, Lauren Johnson, an internationally recognised Guyanese Canadian psychotherapist assisted with workshops. The Foundation also established links with the British Association of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy through its Board member, Guyanese born Krish Nath. We sponsored several highly recognised and trained mental health professionals from the UK to conduct mental health sensitisation campaigns in which they incorporated sports and workshops in Regions 6, 4, 3, 2 and 1.
The University of Medical Sciences in Ciego De Avila, Cuba signed a MoU with the Guyana Foundation, to collaborate for a period of five years to hold annual conferences on mental health name the Psychoavila Conference Series. This is the Foundations fifth year of collaboration hosting a conference in Cuba in April 2022.
Mental Health workshops were also conducted in collaboration with the George Brown University, Queens Health Outreach, Canada and several mental health academics over the past several years.
Our Sunrise Centre has remained fully attended, vibrant and well integrated into the surrounding communities. We have impacted positively thousands of people to the extent that people, who came to us after having survived a suicide attempt, have now become valuable members of our team, assisting others, and giving back to their communities.
We have conducted mental wellness and suicide prevention workshops with first responders, in Regions 2, 3 and 4 and with citizens and schoolchildren. We have sponsored ads in the local media; we have created our own database of the findings from our work.
The scores of Guyanese and non-Guyanese who made valuable contributions to our work of the past six years were somewhat surprised that the Foundation was not invited to the recent mental health conference held in Georgetown.
Our findings from actual work with suicide and mental health matters differ in some instances from the recent utterances coming out of the conference. It is our hope that the authorities will make a better effort to consult more widely on these other matters of national importance, particularly when it involves the most vulnerable citizens in the country.

The Guyana Foundation

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