Mental health issues should not be stigmatised – Health Minister

Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony has called for the stigmatisation of mental health to cease, and actions instead be taken to understand and assist those battling with such problems.

Reminding that the World Health Organization has labelled mental health issues as one of ten prominent diseases that would rise, he has said that is another reason for it to be normalised when people reach out for help.
“Mental health is just like any other disease, so we shouldn’t be stigmatising it. And one of the things that the WHO has pointed out is that we’ll see more persons having mental health issues. This is going to be among the top 10 diseases that we’ll see. We shouldn’t be stigmatising it. What we should understand is how to be able to diagnose it early, recognise the signs and symptoms of the various diseases, and to get people early into treatment,” the Health Minister has shared on Thursday.
Dr Anthony noted that there should be no issue with reaching out for counselling. He explained that, just like the way persons visit medical institutions for a physical injury, the same should apply for mental health problems.
“There’s nothing wrong with going for counselling. There’s nothing wrong with accessing treatment. Whatever these myths are, that you will be stigmatised, we have to dispel that. If you break a finger, you go to the hospital; you don’t think about stigmatisation for that. We should think about mental health illnesses in the same way,” he explained.
According to him, an effective way of dispelling the ignorance that surrounds mental health issues is to have more education. Government is currently working on a Suicide Prevention Bill and a Mental Health Bill, which the Health Minister has said should significantly change the landscape within which such matters are dealt.
“We have been doing a lot of that through the Mental Health Unit and other institutions that we have in the public health sector. The more people come on board to talk about these illnesses, it would help to educate the public in a major way,” he noted.
On the aspect of mental health and COVID, he said this can be divided into two categories. At the beginning, the effects are extended to persons who did not even contract the virus.
“I think you can think of the mental health problems in two broad categories. At the beginning of the pandemic, or when we were now learning more about the pandemic, because we didn’t have enough information to understand the disease itself, there were lots of anxiety and depression,” he said.
“As more information became known about the disease, we found medication that can help. We had less hospitalisation because of the variants, and we would have seen a decline globally in this sort of expression of disease. That’s one category: people that haven’t gotten COVID, but are worried about COVID. You can see manifestations of various psychiatric disorders, like anxiety, depression, insomnia and so forth,” Dr Anthony expressed.
Now, the second category revolves around people who have been infected, and the long-term symptoms which manifest. For some, these effects can persist for even beyond one year.
“When you got infected – whether it’s mild, moderate, or severe form of COVID – one of the effects of the infection can be the manifestation of some neurological changes after this acute phase of the infection passes. In Long COVID, we’re noticing a lot of patients with neurological symptoms. This include people not being able to see well, brain fog, and a whole host of other manifestations. For those persons who, after a COVID infection, if they have these types of symptoms, then it is important for them to come to one of our clinics, where the doctors can help to walk them through this process,” he explained. (G12)