500 Mental patients roam the streets of Accra

Over five hundred (500) mentally-ill patients are currently roaming the streets of Accra and Tema alone, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Mental Health Authority, Dr. Akwasi Osei, has revealed.

This revelation comes in the wake of complaints of growing numbers of mentally challenged persons invading the streets of Accra and causing public obstruction and nuisance to pedestrians, motorists and the main markets.

The situation, according to scores of market women, who spoke to our reporters, has become a matter of concern to them, considering the risk the presence of these mentally-ill patients pose to them.

Trading activities, for instance, the market women told Today, were also being affected because of sometimes the attacks some customers were made to endure by these aggressive mental-ill patients who patrol the market centres almost every day.

The mental patients, Today’s investigations discovered, also defecate about under trees and on pavements, especially in the central business district of the two cities, making the areas unpleasant to the eyes and nose.

But Dr. Akwasi Osei, who was speaking to Today in an interview, said his outfit has over the years been working hard towards the removal of mental patients from the streets.

According to him, “over a period, close to 100 psychiatric patients have been picked from the streets of which 67 patients were picked in Accra and the rest from other regions.

Dr. Osei, however, said funds still remained a major constraint hindering the exercise to remove mentally-ill patients from the streets.

“With respect to the patients on the streets, we have been collecting them but of course on a small scale. Our constraint has been finances; we don’t have enough money to be able to embark on it and raise it to the scale that we would have wished,” he pointed out.

“As at now, we take just 5 people at a time, bring them to the hospital, train them within one or two months and when they’re fine, then we take them back to their communities or wherever they come from,” he added.

He said his outfit did not want to collect more of the mental patients at a time, since according to him, that would give an impression they were “collecting garbage” instead of human beings.

He explained: “if such patients are to be taken in; it must be done with dignity because mental patients are human beings.”

Dr. Osei, however, pointed out that it was costly collecting mental patients, disclosing they spend about GHC2000 on just one trip to collect patients.

He said every collecting trip must involve highly trained professionals including nurses, a medical psychiatric officer, police personnel, Accra Metropolitan Assembly Taskforce, some personnel from non-governmental organisations and volunteers.

All these, he added, cost money in addition to a 30-seater bus which is usually provided by the Accra Psychiatric Hospital.

The Accra Psychiatric Hospital has had to halt admissions into the hospital due to financial constraints facing the facility even though the ministry of health (MoH) is expected to make a budgetary allocation for the three available mental health centres in the country, following the passage of the Mental Health Bill into law in 2012.

For a country which claims to place high premium on mental health issues, especially after the passage of the Mental Health Act, the events before and after the passage of the Act showed Ghana placed very little or no importance on mental health care, checks by Today revealed.

The healthcare centres, this paper understand, are currently in need of an estimated 4 million Ghana cedis for proper and an effective management.