Mental health: 67,000 persons targeted with Cdn$2.9M grant – Dr Anthony

The Canadian Government has released a grant to the International Development and Relief Foundation (IDRF) of CA$2.9 million to be used in the area of mental health in Guyana.
Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony shared that this is coming out of the Guyana Mental Health and Well Being Conference earlier this month. Over the course of five years, the intended reach is a whopping 67,000 persons with mental health challenges.

“This project would go over the next five years a

nd during the life of the project, the intention is to reach at least 67,000 persons and help them with issues relating to mental health, including training,” he informed.
Under a partnership and funding with UNICEF, Guyana is being assisted to train its healthcare workers, especially nursing staff.
“Right now, we have psychiatric aides that work at the hospitals. We have 73 of these category of workers and we want to upgrade their skills. Each of these persons, we are going to work to see to enrol them in a nursing assistance programme and over the next couple months, they can be upgraded.”
Meanwhile the Pan America Health Organisation (PAHO) remains a close partner under the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP), helping primary care physicians to diagnose the more common psychiatric illnesses that would present during primary healthcare visits.
The Minister opined, “By doing this, we envisage that we can identify people who are vulnerable to suicide and once we take action, we should reduce those numbers. There are a number of training that would be happening and we already have partners that would be working with us.”
Resilience training has also been rolled out for the population, and facilitators were also trained. This will be ongoing over the next year.
“We started some training in resilience, teaching the general population how to cope with stress, what to do, how to do it. In some cases, we were able to train a number of trainers who would use this technique to help persons in the community.”
There is a Mental Health Unit located on Quamina Street, Georgetown where persons can make contact to participate or seek assistance.
Last week’s conference would have revealed that approximately 10 to 15 per cent of Guyanese have a mental health disorder, according to the Guyana National Mental Health Action Plan, painting the need for intervention and data collection. Challenges such as COVID would also have to be included in the action plan, since many patients developed depression and anxiety during treatment and after discharge.
Statistics place Guyana at second in the world for the highest suicide rate with 40.3 for every 100,000 persons. In 2020, a gender breakdown of suicides pointed to 19 per cent for males and 81 per cent for females.
Most recent figures also show that 15-20 per cent of the Guyanese population have some form of mental health illness, be it mild, severe, or acute. There are 150 different conditions that can be classified as mental health illnesses. (G12)