10 Feb 2013

Turning a blind eye on mental health issues has been partly blamed on the poor service delivery that some employees continue to exhibit.

Addressing participants at a mental health workshop at Masunga Primary Hospital on February 8, an official of the Ministry of Health, Mr Ookame Charles said because such issues were often ignored, they often manifested in the workplace, resulting in poor delivery of services to customers.

Thus, he emphasised the need for such issues to be given undivided attention, noting that mental health was as crucial to one’s general well-being as physical health.

Mr Charles also underscored the need for all stakeholders to join hands and fight the stigma associated with mental illnesses.

The stigma, he said, contributed greatly to the nation living in denial as far as mental health issues were concerned. Mental health issues , he said, should no longer be ignored since poor mental health often led to many other diseases.

“Poor mental health can take control of your life. It is the root cause of most disease,” he said, further indicating that currently, mental and behavioural disorders accounted for 12 per cent of all diseases globally.

Mr Charles cited depression as rapidly becoming more prevalent amongst forms of mental health issues; something he said could be attributed to the varied and complex life issues that people worldwide faced today.

He said studies had shown that men were the hardest hit by depression at 31 per cent compared to their female counterparts at 25 per cent.

That, he said was because women naturally talked and shared their problems unlike men who tended to keep their concerns to themselves. He stated that depression and all the other forms of mental illnesses contributed greatly to the growth in incidents of suicides.

Ms Omphile Bachopi, a psychiatric nurse at Masunga Primary Hospital concurred that mental health issues were widespread in the country.

She however noted that the general public lacked knowledge on how such issues must be addressed.

She also linked some cases of suicide to metal health problems, also indicating that men were in most cases victims of suicide, while women topped cases of attempted suicide.

That, she said was likely to be because males often used more lethal ways of ending their lives compared to females. ENDS