The Centre for People’s Right Empowerment Initiative (CPRI), a non-governmental organisation based in the Upper West Region, has called on the government to increase funds allocated to the Mental Health Authority and other agencies working within the same sector. CPRI said the increase in funding will aid in the comprehensive treatment of persons living with mental health conditions.
CPRI said successive governments had failed to commit enough funds to help in the procurement of drugs to treat prevalent mental health conditions in the country.
The result, the Organisation said, is about 7 percent loss in productivity across the country. Speaking to A1 Radio ahead of the reading of the 2022 Budget Statement and Economic Policy, on the 17th of November 2021, a Programme Officer with CPRI, Dominic Wunigura drew the attention of government to the importance of increasing funding to the sector.
“Ghana loses about 7 percent of its GDP as a result of the number of otherwise productive population suffering from various forms of mental health conditions. We are thus looking forward to government increasing its investment to community-based mental rehabilitation for persons with mental health conditions,” he explained.
He said increment in funding to the sector will go into the procurement of “psychotropic medications at community and district level mental health units”. Mr. Wunigura intimated that neglect of the Mental Health Sector has been systematic, a situation he describes as worrying.
Mr. Wunigura explained that persons with mental health conditions are dying off while others are relapsing due to the absence of drugs for treatment. “The mental health sector is simply folding from out engagements with mental health staff at the community level. Many are contemplating diverting into different fields other than mental health in their further studies. They come to work and they are hiding from their patients because they have no drugs to issue,” he lamented.
The 2022 Budget Statement and Economic Policy to be read in Parliament by the Minister for Finance Ken Ofori-Atta is expected to outline the programmes and activities for effective budget coordination along with government’s macroeconomic policies.
A1Radioonline.com|101.1MHz| Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
How long and loud should the issue of attention towards Mental Health be hammered for government to internalize and activate its needfulness. Governments apparently have not discovered that the healthcare delivery sector is the most important in the fight for economic growth and laying comfortably on top of it is Mental Health. It doesn’t take a technical eye to see that abnormality has outstripped normality in our country today, or do you think its simply normal looking at the shocking state of indiscipline in today’s Ghana.? Anyway let’s not be surprised , the mentally challenged almost always have loss of insight into their condition and that of their country.
Less I forget , Mentally challenged clients at Mankessim dread being set ablaze. Ostensibly for lack of medicine to get them cured they galavanting engaging in petty theft. Am openly canvassing for help , in psychiatry don’t joke with death threats.