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Commissioner
Byrne,
Colleagues
and friends,
Earlier this week, I was in Kenya for a number of
meetings with the Secretary-General and the other UN agencies, using
the occasion to have an early start to the celebrations of World
Health Day.
I visited Mathari Psychiatric Hospital, which is
Kenya’s only national mental institution. I talked to a number of
patients. One in particular stays in my mind. A bright young girl
explained to me how she had become psychotic after a period of
drinking too much alcohol and smoking marijuana. She was a student at
one of Nairobi’s universities and now concerned that she would not
be able to get back to school and finish her courses.
The doctors told her she now had good chances of
recovering and returning to her normal life. She was grateful for the
support and treatment she had received, and determined to move on.
Until some years ago, Mathari was a typical mental
institution of the old kind, like thousands of others around the
world. It had more than fifteen hundred patients crammed into too
little space, and they all stayed for months, often years. Physical
restraint and idleness often took the place of proper medication and
psycho-therapy, and when coming out, a stay at Mathari had branded
them for life. Once a psychiatric patient – always a mental case,
was the common judgement among people. In Kenya, as in so many other
countries around the world.
Now, Mathari has cut down the number of patients to
around 400. The average stay for inpatients is around 14 days.
Patients gets proper care, which includes medication and other
therapy. Mathari is now a place to recover before returning to society
to continue life – it is no longer the end of the road.
Hopefully, this young girl will find that society
has also changed. That an experience of mental illness does not brand
her for life.
Today, as we celebrate World Health Day, we will
hear much more about stigma and the damage it does. We will hear about
the violation of the basic human rights of patients, mainly of those
in large psychiatric institutions. And we will hear about the
tremendous gap between the number of people who are ill and those who
actually get the treatment they need.
But we will also hear about the effective
treatments that exist. How prevention and early detection can
drastically reduce the burden of severe mental illness or the effects
of brain disorders. We will hear how the families of those who suffer,
and the local communities, can play a key role in supporting and
assisting patients in the struggle to regain their full mental health
and their role in society. We will hear how mental health care and
prevention needs to be integrated into main health services, so that
primary health care includes mental health, and that those who need
hospitalization more often can stay in ordinary hospitals with other
patients who suffer physical illness – and not be separated in
special institutions, surrounded by ignorance and fear.
By the end of today, I hope all of us who are here
– but also the many millions who will celebrate the day in thousands
of venues around the globe – will gather new hope. Hope based on a
sense of change. Change of perceptions and realities.
This is the second time the World Health Day
focuses on the theme of mental health. The first time, 42 years
ago, we already had a clear view of the need to fight stigma and
discrimination and to bring mental illness in from the cold – into
communities and ordinary health care.
The difference is that today, we have better
knowledge, we have better medication, and we have a better
understanding of what works and what does not.
We now really can challenge each other and the
world to Stop Exclusion and Dare to Care!
Thank you. |
