Educate families about mental illness, says family therapist
WELL-KNOWN western Jamaica-based family therapist Dr Beverly Scott is calling on the Ministry of Health to provide sensitisation training for the families of mentally ill persons so that they will be better equipped to properly treat and interact with them.
Scott’s call comes against the background of a recent announcement by Health Minister
Dr Christopher Tufton that several mentally ill patients, who are now housed at the Bellevue Hospital in
Kingston, will be released and sent home to be cared for by their families.
“I think the relatives should get an understanding of mental illness, maybe from the Ministry [of Health] or from persons who have training, and do sensitisation on what mental illness really is,” said Scott.
“The families need to understand the issues that their relatives are going through so that they will know how to handle the problem.”
She added, “A lot of people believe that if you are mentally ill, you’re no good or you can’t function, and it is a stigma to the family. That’s one of the reasons why relatives dissociate themselves from persons who are mentally ill as it is not seen as a normal illness like cancer, diabetes, or hypertension.”
Scott said that an education on mental illness is quite relevant because in many cases, mental illnesses are not immediately obvious.
NO ONE IS TOTALLY SANE
“There are different types of mental illness,” said Scott. “Every one of us has some level of mental illness; there’s no one who is totally sane. Every one of us is neurotic [obsessive] in some way or another, and all of us have some amount of idiosyncrasies [eccentric habits], so we need to understand those persons among us who are a little bit worse than us and deal with them in a respectable way.”
In August, Tufton said that many mentally ill persons end up homeless because of lack of support from their relatives and noted that more than half of Bellevue Hospital’s 800 mental health patients could be released to their families.