It is common sight to find junkies and other persons with mental health challenges roaming the streets of the cities and other big towns of Ghana.
It is in itself curious why even those who suffer the mental health challenges in the villages and small towns move to the urban areas.
These sick persons have become security threat and a nuisance to the public, making the public to call for their evacuation and confinement at the appropriate places like the mental hospitals to protect others from their attacks.
There are, for instance, reports of these sick persons attacking people and wounding them without any provocation and others hustling people for money and food.
Besides, some of them rain insults on passers-by and those who do not hurry to leave their presence become targets of physical attacks.
They are also a nuisance because they cause sanitation mess wherever they choose to stay on the streets.
It is the expectation of every worried member of the public that these problems must be addressed by the relevant government agencies to ensure some sanity in the system.
However, the Chief Executive Officer of Mental Health Authority (MHA), Dr Akwasi Osei, during a programme on Ghana Television recently monitored by theGhanaian Times, said evacuating all persons with mental health challenges is a task next to impossibility because it needs strong financial muscle.
He explained that “for every one person on the street we will bring to the hospital to treat, in terms of clothing, feeding, accommodation and repatriating him or sending him back to his community when he’s well, it will require funding.”
Meanwhile, he says the psychiatric hospitals are not getting adequate funding from the government and is calling on the state to establish a mental health levy to get funds for mental healthcare.
A source online states that mental health care attracts only 1.4 per cent of the country’s total health budget.
Dr Osei has hit the nail right on its head because mental healthcare seems to attract less funding across the globe.
The World Health Organisation’s new Mental Health Atlas states that its latest data involves 171 nations and that just 39 per cent of responding countries indicated that the necessary human resources had been allocated and 34 per cent of the required financial resources had been provided.
As things stand now, what can be done is a national education on causes and symptoms of mental disorders so that family members, friends, colleagues and others can monitor each other and seek advice concerning what to do.
The state should also be stern on those who abuse substances before they eventually suffer mental health challenges and on the drug barons and peddlers too.
Mental disorders need serious attention because they are mostly the diseases that prevent their sufferers from contributing to both self-progress and national development.
It is, therefore, important that the state does what it can to contain their causes, where possible, in order to reduce mental health cases in the country.
