Food suppliers cut credit to mental homes

Daily Graphic. Pg. 55 Thurs. June 25/09

Story Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho

FOOD suppliers have cut supplies on credit to the three mental health institutions in the country until a debt of GH¢3 million owed them is paid.
The amount is for food supplied to the Accra Psychiatric Hospital (APH), the Pantang Psychiatric Hospital (PPH) and the Ankaful Psychiatric Hospital over the last four years.
The situation has resulted in the inmates of the APH sometimes having to take porridge without sugar and bread.
The acting Head of the APH, Dr Akwasi Osei, who made this known during a public forum on ‘Women’s Right and mental health in Ghana’, said the hospitals had resorted to using two-thirds of their allocations to service their debt, thereby leaving them with little money to take care of the inmates.
According to Dr. Osei, who is a Chief Psychiatrist of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), the 60Gp a day allocated to the inmates was inadequate to sustain them and, therefore, called on the government to increase the amount.
He also called on the government to expedite action on the passage of the Mental Health Bill which, according to him, had, for the past three years, been shelved at the Ministry of Health.
Dr Osei said the APH recorded more female mental health patients than men and attributed that to a number of factors, including the biological make-up of women, differences in physiological responses to stress, hormonal factors as in menses, pregnancy, menopause, mood and behavioural changes associated with fluctuations in sex hormones and the adverse effects of inferior status accorded women generally by society.
He said in 2005 the APH recorded an outpatient attendance of 23,692 females as against 20,519 males; 23,334 females in 2006 as against 19,628 males, and 22,430 females in 2007 as against 18,224 males.
He mentioned some of the frequent ailments that were recorded at the hospital as depression, acute psychotic disorders, schizophrenia, neurosis, epilepsy, substance abuse, mania schizo-affect disorder, alcohol depression and dementia.
He mentioned some of the causes of mental illness in women as marital problems such as divorce and separation, maltreatment within marriage, polygamy, battering, emotional and financial withdrawal, widowhood issues and relationship problems.
Others are the aftermath of childbirth, menopause, rape and defilement, financial burden, domestic problems, drug abuse and genetics.
A clinical psychologist, Dr. Angela Ofori-Atta, who spoke on the topic, 'Understanding women's mental illness in Ghana', said poverty was one of the major causes of mental disorders among most women in the country.
She said women with low or medium income were more susceptible to mental disorder than rich women, saying that depression also accounted for one-third of mental disorders in the country.
The Policy Research Officer of Basic Needs, a non-governmental organisation based in the northern part of the country, Ms Truelove Antwi-Bekoe, who gave a situational report on women's mental health in Ghana and its challenges for advocacy, said women's mental health could be adequately tackled if the government put in more effort at addressing some of the problems being faced in that direction.
Dr Rose Mensah-Kutin, the Convenor of NETRIGHT, organisers of the forum, said the forum was necessitated by the fact that the rights of most women with mental disorders were being trampled upon by society because there was no law protecting them.