THE Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare is shifting emphasis from centralised mental health care to community-based mental health care to expand services to more than 16,875 registered mental patients in the country.
Currently, the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, which has the capacity for 600 patients, is accommodating 1,200 mental patients in what can be described as a “concentration camp”.
The Minister of Employment and Social Welfare, Mr Enoch Teye Mensah, announced the policy decision at an international conference on Mental Health in Accra last Monday.
He said the centralised mental health delivery system had failed to mainstream cured mental patients into society.
Rather, he said, the current policy had increased stigmatisation.
Mr Mensah said when the Mental Health Law was reviewed, it would expand services to the socially excluded and ensure the reinstatement of mental patients who lost their jobs following their illness after they had fully been cured.
He hinted that the government was restructuring the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme to offer assistance to the very poor in society, including mental patients.
Dr Akwasi Osei, the Chief Psychiatrist of the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, said mental health had experienced three revolutions in recent times. These included the acceptance that mental sickness was not a spiritual disease and the discovery of drugs to deal with the health condition.
He said the third revolution was the shifting of emphasis from centralised psychiatric hospitals to community-based care and treatment.
Dr Osei said the Ministry of Health had accepted to foot the bills of sending over 600 mental patients who had recovered to their various homes to decongest the Accra Psychiatrist Hospital.
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