fwd:point

''60 percent Gambians have mental or behavioural disorder''

The number of psychiatric cases is on the increase in The Gambia according to a career psychiatric nurse at the Campama Psychiatric Unit. Basing his assertions on a hypothesis from the community mental health team Pa Bakary Sonko claimed that mental or behavioural cases among Gambians have increased to about sixty percent over the last couple of years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent at the Campama Psychiatric unit, the career psychiatric nurse said the mental health situation of Gambians gauged from a broad spectrum shows that it is not only people who have vigrant or psychiatric disorder in the streets who fall into the bracket.

He said it also include a good number of Gambians who are otherwise seen as normal persons bearing traces of behavioural disorders. He further noted that even the remaining 40 percent without mental disorder are characterized by people with relative neurotic disorder.

In this vein he argued that in relation to pathological disorder, people diagnosed with mental illnesses have mania depression, and anxiety disorder. He observed that over a considerable amount of time people with physical symptom of mental disorder and behavioral problems visit mental health clinics or general OPD medical clinics.

He said such people talk to themselves in the streets while others are afflicted with forgetfulness by way of misplacing things without remembering where they had placed them. On the many causative factors he said the exposure of people to harmful substances like alcohol, cannabis, heroin and the lack of jobs compounded by socio economic and political uncertainties are mainly responsible for post-traumatic stress disorders among many Gambians.

He also observed that people with family and employment problems are rendered emotionally unsettled accounting for a socio cultural factor. Sonko also referred to the culture of silence attending the situation because of the danger of losing one’s job or being ostracized from society should one report his problem.

He also said that there is also an accompanying sense of insecurity among people who cannot take family responsibility or help relatives amidst social and political changes in which some people are killed or imprisoned. He said people who are affected directly or indirectly are normally left traumatised by the experience. He suggested that anger, frustration, and other related emotional distress could be pent-up to render a given individual as a human volcano of emotions.

 

 comment :

may the spirit of the ancestors preserve, protect and give you and your workmates more strenght to carry on your work professionally in the tradition of dr franz fannon and dr  wesling.

we must thank the ancestors for surviving so long after centuries of accumulated local and foreign oppression .hope this report will be given the serious study it deserves as a further testimony to the urgency of the problem

arresting the further decline into the depths of mental and behavourial disorders increasingly being manifested in all aspects social life is the responsibility of all of us concerned Liberating our oppressed people from the local and foreign oppressors will be a major step in the right direction of MENTAL HEALTH