Mental Health And the ‘Abodam’ Stigma

By: Basiru Adam

As for Kwaw Kesse, perhaps Ghana’s most cheeky hiplife artist, he must be living largely by ingeniously choosing for a trade name ‘Abodam’ – madness. The gesture he makes by hitting a clenched fist against his head has caught on with Ghanaians, young and old, so much that one would think mental illness were a tolerable phenomenon in the Ghanaian society.

In reality however, that is far from the case. In Ghana today, stigmatization against mentally ill people, even the rehabilitated ones, is in itself identified by experts as one major psychological challenge they deal with.

Mr. Evans Oheneba-Mensah is a Project Research Officer with BasicNeeds, an NGO that has been working to improve the lot of mentally ill people in Ghana. "When I first joined BasicNeeds," a friend who saw me enter the Psychiatric Hospital twice had to call another friend of mine to ask if I was O.K."

So by simply paying a regular visit to the psychiatric hospital as part of his work, he had been suspected of being mentally sick, a reason enough for him to be avoided. "The stigma is so high that if I am epileptic and my mum sells kenkey, then there is the likelihood that nobody will buy my mum’s kenkey."

But Mr. Oheneba-Mensah and his outfit have pressed on, trying to bring some level of comfort into the lives of mental health patients and their care takers.

Better still, Madam Doris Appiah-Danquah, 54, is a rehabilitated mental health patient. If one is not told, nothing about her shows that she had ever been mentally ill. Indeed, yours truly found her extremely intelligent during a short interview at a training workshop organized by BasicNeeds for Mental Health Self-help groups in Accra. But she has had her fair share of stigmatization, especially in her bid to pursue a career in nursing.

She was only twenty-three years when she got jilted by a boyfriend. This time, she was doing her finals, part one in medical school. She became psychologically traumatized. Her family quickly sent her to a fetish priest in Lartei. "That was the beginning of my woes."

Later however, the family took her to hospital and thankfully she regained her mind. She went back to school and graduated in 1998 with a degree in nursing. But then she was failed three times when she had to sit for the nursing certificate examination that would qualify her as a practicing nurse. She believes it was a deliberate attempt, with stigmatization at the root of it, to deny her a chance in life. "Because of ignorance people avoid us. It is even worse than HIV/AIDS. Everybody can hear music and start dancing, when you do that they say you are mad. The drunkard, who cannot locate the hole in the ballot box, has the right to vote whilst we don’t. We need people to understand us. We need people to give us the benefit of the doubt; we need people to even try us out. Why am I not being given a chance in society?"

But Madam Doris Appiah-Danquah has fought long enough to be given the benefit of the doubt and to be tried out by the authorities at the Ministry of Health. She says she has grown tired of having to visit the ministry in response to ‘go and come tomorrow’ assurances. The former Minister of Health, Dr. Richard Anane had insisted they give her a job. She was promised to be employed as a Health Educator. "But since the minister was transferred from the ministry, that was the end."

She has not given up though; an NGO called AwaaWaa2 has, as its name suggests, welcome her with open arms and she works there as a Coordinator. She is also the National Treasurer of the Mental Health Society of Ghana. She has a daughter who is in form one at Achimota Senior High School. She feels it is a great achievement for her, a single mother and one considered ‘mad,’ to have been able to educate her daughter when a lot of ‘sane’ people have not.

Meanwhile, BasicNeeds has been working towards building the capacity of self help groups that are made up of rehabilitated patients and care takers of those still under medical care. The latest initiative by BasicNeeds is to train the groups on the Local Government System and Decentralisation in Ghana. A three-day workshop was hence held in Accra and according to the Country Programme Manager, Mr. Peter Yaro this is to make them aware of the opportunities available to them at the District Assemblies and where and how to go for support. He said the mentally ill people fall under the disability group in Ghana and so they have a share in the share of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) that goes to disabled groups.

BasicNeeds has been advocating a more community based mental health service provision or "de-hospitalisation" of mental health care. Peter Yaro believes that is the only sure way "to reach several hundreds of people who clearly cannot come to the mental hospitals, especially the northern parts. Even down south, the mental hospitals can hardly hold the number of people with mental problems."

Source: Public Agenda