Katanga Alumni donates to Accra Psychiatric Hospital

The Katanga Alumni Association has donated assorted food items to the Accra Psychiatric Hospital to support the upkeep of patients and ease pressure on the facility.

Membership of the association is made up of students who were resident in the University Hall also known as Katanga, during their tertiary education at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

The food items included four sacks of rice, a sack of maize, bags of water, 10 crates of eggs, 100 tubers of yam, two gallons each of palm oil and vegetable oil.

Others included a box of tomatoes, a sack each of ginger, soya beans and beans, four American tins of agushie, two mini sacks of onions, a sack of maize, a bucket of margarine, a sack each of salt and pepper.

After the presentation ceremony, the management of the hospital led the members of the association present, on a tour of the wards.

Significant

Presenting the items, the President of the Global Katanga Alumni Association, Nana Otu Turkson, said the donation was their way of supporting the vulnerable in society.

Mr Turkson said the gesture was also in line with the association’s tradition to assist the psychiatric hospital on an annual basis, and thus, acknowledged the effort of all members of the group who assisted in various ways to make the donation possible.

“This engagement started around 2007 by those before us and we have at least been consistent and made sure that every year, we come to support.”

“Mental illness is actually a matter of a sliding scale.

We all experience it at some point or the other and therefore we take this as a very serious social responsibility to give back to our brothers and sisters who find themselves in such unfortunate situations because we never know when we might need the services,” he said.

Seek Mental Health Assistance

A Nurse and Public Relation Officer of the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Francisca Ntow, who received the items on behalf of the hospital, thanked the group for their gesture.

She used the opportunity to advise men to seek mental health assistance when faced with an emotional problem.

That, she explained, was because most men often struggled to open up about their emotions because of societal expectations of them; hence, leading to depression.

“Men would actually shield everything to get to the point where they can't take it anymore and then they are admitted.

So currently, we see a lot of men on admission than we see women at the hospital,” she said.

Consequently, she urged the public to pay attention to their health, saying, “include mental health checks in your regular general medical check-ups so issues are picked up early.

“Walk to any facility or psychiatric hospital to see and tell the doctor or the nurses that you think you need to be assessed mentally. It's not wrong,” she said.