Clubs to promote mental health awareness in schools
BasicNeeds-Ghana, a mental healthcare and development advocacy non-governmental organisation (NGO), has initiated a programme to intensify the formation of Mental Health Clubs in junior and senior high schools for members of such clubs to become forerunners in mental healthcare awareness campaign in the country.
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According to the organisation, the programme was a major component of initiatives to involve of teenagers in mental health issues, to speed up campaign on the subject.
The Project Officer of BasicNeeds-Ghana, Mr Kingsley Kumbelim, told journalists that the initiation of the programme was necessitated by the poor knowledge of mental health issues among the populace, superstitious attributes to causes and stigmatisation, as well as low funding for the sector.
Districts covered
The project covers the Nkwanta-South, Nkwanta-North, Krachi-West, Krachi-East and Krachi-Nchumuru districts in the Volta Region and eight others in the Northern Region.
They are the Tamale Metropolis and Savelugu-Nanton, Karega, West-Mamprusi, East-Gonja, West-Gonja, Saboba and Chereponi districts.
He said 1,770 people (898 boys and 872 girls) had so far been listed unto the clubs in the various schools.
He also said community health nurses, teachers and social workers were other groups targeted and being trained and resourced in line with the project objectives.
The Northern Regional Mental Health Coordinator, Mumuni Fuseini, who educated 60 students from the Adom Model Junior High School at Nkwanta on mental health issues, said the Mental Health Authority was actively working to integrate mental health care into the mainstream health service.
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Facility for mental health cases
He said every hospital should be working towards setting up a five to 10-bed capacity facility for mental health cases.
Mr Fuseini said the authority was doing its best to get district assemblies to accept that the mentally sick persons should also be beneficiaries of the two per cent of the common fund reserved for people with disabilities.
He took the club through conditions common to mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy.
The school’s Health Coordinator, Ms Lydia Ladjer, said plans had been made to sustain the clubs.
In an interview, a member of the club said before joining the club, she had thought that epilepsy was incurable, contagious and associated it with superstition, adding that she would now change the wrong perceptions about the disease at home and in the community.
Similar clubs have been formed in schools in the other project beneficiary districts.