The Acute Psychiatric Unit headed by Chief Psychiatrist, Dr. Griffin Benjamin, is looking forward to a promising 2017 after a vagrancy programme was approved by Cabinet.
Dr. Benjamin, speaking to GIS news revealed that one of the biggest successes of 2016 was Cabinet’s approval of a $102, 000 proposal to provide care for vagrants.
“The public believes the vagrants are the responsibility of the health department but those of us who study this well know that it is a national problem. It’s not a political issue, it crosses all political parties…when Cabinet accepted the proposal we knew that psychiatry was given a chance to shine, to express itself differently than to just admit, medicate, then discharge; we are now looking at rehabilitation.”
On Monday, January 9th, the mental health team will meet to implement the vagrancy project.
“With the funds that the Cabinet has made available to us, we are going to rehabilitate the facility that we have and we are going to provide rehabilitation for people who no longer just respond to medication or just respond to any basic things we give them. We now have to teach them how to level like dignified human beings and so we want to admit them and increase our social and psychological and occupational support for them. So if we can achieve these things in 2017, I think the face of psychiatry might just change in Dominica,” he explained.
Dr. Benjamin said further that the tourism sector has expressed enthusiasm to participate in the programme.
“Mr. Gregoire Nassief has agreed to talk to us a little on the issue of how can the private sector help us to help those guys who have not worked but are now going to be rehabilitated; what kind of support they can get in terms of giving them opportunities to work and earn something for themselves…,” he said.
The Chief Psychiatrist asserted that this positive news is a huge break from the challenges the unit faced in 2016. He highlighted two major challenges are lack of adequate human resource and repeated admittance of drug and alcohol abusers.
However, he was happy to report a huge turn around in the acceptance of the public to the issues of mental health since there was much stigma and discrimination attached to the issue.
“We saw people come to the unit and asked to be admitted; we saw families come to the unit and asked us to really help their relatives and we saw patients and relatives are relatively happy,” he said.
Dr. Benjamin stated that an additional $40,000 from a government project which they have access to will assist the unit to rehabilitate the facility and provide improved mental health care.