Ghana doctor laments poor attention to mental health

In an interview in Accra, Dr Osei, a staunch advocate on mental health, said neglect of mental health in any country shows the lack of seriousness that the country attached to the well-being of its people.According to a survey, Ghana’s doctor-patient ratio for mental health is one doctor to almost two million people. The country […]

In an interview in Accra, Dr Osei, a staunch advocate on mental health, said neglect of mental health in any country shows the lack of seriousness that the country attached to the well-being of its people.
According to a survey, Ghana’s doctor-patient ratio for mental health is one doctor to almost two million people. The country has only 14 psychiatric doctors and a population of almost 26 million, while there are only 1,600 psychiatric nurses instead of 20,000 as per World Health Organisation (WHO) standard. The country also has only one occupational therapist.
Dr Osei, who is also a chief psychiatrist at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, one of three mental health institutions in the country, said the magnitude of mental disorders among the population was not known as a lot of people were suffering from minor ailments such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and multiple personality disorder among others.
“It takes just a small incident to trigger these mental disorders into becoming evident in people.”
Dr Osei, who for a long time has been advocating for more funding for the three mental institutions in the country – the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Ankaful Hospital in the Central Region and Pantang Hospital also in Accra – was hopeful that with the setting up of a mental fund last year, things would soon improve in the country.
Ghana’s mental health sector is funded primarily by government and is supplemented to a small extent by internally generated funds and donations.
Figures from the Ministry of Health for 2011 showed a mental health budget for the three mental hospitals of GHc 4,516,163 (without staff salaries and capital investment).
Meanwhile, the total amount spent by government on health in 2011 was GHc 398,857,000 thus the spending on mental health was a minimum of 1.4 per cent of the country’s total health budget.
As Ghana attains a middle income status, Dr Osei is of the view that there is the need for the government to look seriously at mental health, saying that globalisation and its attendant problems could heighten people’s mental conditions.
Ghana passed a Mental Health Act law in March 2012. The passing of the Act which was a culmination of a lot of work by various individuals and institutions spanning several decades, saw the setting up of the Mental Health Authority (MHA) in 2013.
With the passage of the act and the establishment of the MHA, Dr Osei said there was a raised prospect of the delivery of a better quality mental healthcare and also the protection of human rights of people with mental disorders in the country.
 WHO estimate
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), mental health disorders accounted for 12 per cent of the global disease burden in 2000.
This figure is estimated to rise to 15 per cent in 2020, when unipolar depression, which is a serious clinical mood disorder in which feelings of sadness, frustration, loss, or anger interfere with a person’s everyday life for weeks or months at a time, is predicted to rise from being the fourth to the second most disabling health condition in the world.
Data on the epidemiology of mental disorders in Ghana is inadequate and outdated, thereby limiting the ability to compute the burden of these disorders.
However, a population based epidemiological study in 1984 estimated the prevalence of schizophrenia (a mental disorder often characterised by abnormal social behaviour and failure to recognise what is real) to be 2 in every 1,000 persons.
Also, there are no hard figures on the epidemiology of mental illness in Ghana. The convention then is to use the WHO epidemiological formula for the estimation of psychiatric problems in any given population.
By this formula, 10 per cent of any given population suffer from neuropsychiatric conditions and one per cent from severe mental illness at any one time.