October 10th every year has been declared World Mental Health Day, to help raise public awareness of mental health concerns globally and to motivate society to support mental health.
This theme for this year’s commemoration “Make Mental Health and Wellbeing for All a Global Priority” is a wake-up call for us in Ghana.
While significant progress has been made particularly with the enactment of enabling regulatory and policy frameworks and the setting up of institutions and systems, a lot more still remains to be done if we call ourselves a nation that prioritises mental health. According to the WHO (2021), only 2.8% of mentally ill persons in Ghana are able to access treatment, with most mental health patients unable to receive professional care. Relative to the WHO benchmark of one psychiatrist/100,000 population, Ghana’s psychiatrist to population ratio is 0.058 per 100,000 population, and 0.065 psychologists per 100,000 population. In addition, infrastructural constraints, lack of sustainable funding for mental health services and continuing stigmatisation of mental health issues are critical challenges that must be addressed to achieve our vision of Health for All.
We call on all stakeholders, including government, Parliament, the private sector, civil society, traditional and religious authorities, and the media to work together to ensure sustainable access to quality mental health services for all Ghanaians. We need to increase investments in mental health care. We need to fight stigmatisation. We need to strengthen institutions and agencies charged with delivering inclusive quality mental health services.
There can be NO HEALTH WITHOUT MENTAL HEALTH!!
About STAR-Ghana Foundation:
STAR-Ghana Foundation is a centre for active citizenship and philanthropy. It emerged from a 10-year multi-donor funded programme with the mandate of providing support to strengthen civil society activism and enable citizens to engage with the state to ensure accountable, transparent, and responsive governance at local and national levels. The vision of the Foundation is a well-informed civil society able to contribute to transformational change around key challenges of poverty, inequality, and inclusion for all citizens. Its mission is to increase the effectiveness of citizens’ influence for change that advances democracy, accountability, and social inclusion.
Under the health sector portfolio, forty (40) projects were supported between 2010 and till date. Projects focused on health sector budget advocacy, tackling accountability in health insurance, strengthening community participation in the monitoring of healthcare delivery, including access to maternal healthcare, promotion of mental healthcare and policy advocacy, including on covid-19 and access to healthcare. Projects directly reached 4,778,603 citizens (including media reach).
The Foundation also contributed to the passage of the Legislative Instrument (LI), in 2020 to operationalize the Mental Health Act; Budgetary allocation by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly for mental health for the first time in its 2013-2017 Medium Term Development Plan; and the launch of the National guidelines for Traditional and Faith-Based Healers in Mental Health to complement implementation of the mental health act. STAR-Ghana also carried out a research and documented evidence on COVID-19 and implications on maternal healthcare and family planning services to inform policy planning.