Focus on mental health

After many years, the State finally appears to be taking some proactive measures to deal with such persons. For decades, the mentally ill have been decanted into the underfunded St Ann’s Hospital.

Indeed, a feature story by Newsday writer Lara Pickford-Gordon last week revealed that funding for mental health was not even included in the Health Ministry’s budget. Instead, the St Ann’s hospital got money which was left over from specific projects or accessed from other sources of funding. In other words, the official attitude reflected the private one: hide those abnormal people away so we do not have to be embarrassed by them. In last week’s article, Errol Gordon, the general manager for Mental Health Services of the North-Central Regional Health Authority, noted that many relatives simply dropped off patients and never visited them again.

But some change is happening. Mental health services are now funded in the national Budget, and there is a move to have patients resume their lives within the community. A rehabilitation clinic has been set up in Arima, which will serve as a transition point for those patients whose needs can be met outside the hospital environment. The importance of such a move in treating mental illness cannot be overestimated. Human beings are social creatures, and a common trait of all forms of mental illness is an impaired ability to socialise.

At the most extreme, this impairment takes the form of murderous psychosis. But, more commonly, it means the inability to relate to other persons. Imagine having no friends or lovers, because you are unable to control your feelings of sadness or anger or because you are unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes on what other people are saying. The resultant social isolation only worsens the individual’s condition. However, if chemical treatment can reduce the symptoms to the point where the affected person can make some effort to live within normal society, this in itself can create a cycle of psychological improvement. “Patients who work for a living are likely to remain better than those in the custodial system,” Specialist Medical Officer Dr Dave Ameerali noted in the interview with Newsday. “They remain well because they have meaning and purpose in life.”

For this whole programme to work, however, the public will have to be better informed about mental illness.

The common picture of mentally ill persons is still that of individuals who walk about muttering to themselves and who are liable to become violent without warning. But mental illness covers a wide variety of dysfunctions, and those patients who are to be sent out from the institutions are those who, once they are on medication and still receiving regular therapy, should be able to function as normal individuals.

But the people with whom they interact must understand this, and not place additional stresses on persons whose psyches are already more fragile than those of ordinary people. Our ability and willingness to treat with such individuals will reflect on our compassion and understanding as a society.