AN English daily on Saturday reported that the conscientious citizens and the concerned professionals in a view-sharing meeting on ‘Draft Mental Health Act 2014’ agreed that currently the issues of mental health and the persons suffering from the disease and their medicare along with post treatment situation are rather ignored. Still, the issue is more a social stigma in the public eyes than a mere medical condition. It was, however, agreed that there is the urgent need to look afresh at the problem with a changed social mind-set treating these persons otherwise resourceful ones. And the law should make provision for that ideal situation in the society. Effective efforts of government bodies and NGOs are needed to prevent the rapid increase of mental illness among people and better patient services need to be ensured for the betterment of the country.
According to available data, 16.1 percent of adults and 18.4 percent of children suffer from different types of mental illnesses in Bangladesh while around 10,000 of such patients commit suicide annually. Experts say the reason behind this is intense social stigma attached to mental illnesses and getting ‘therapy’ is considered almost a taboo. This in turn creates an obstacle in the counselling and treatment of the patients and thus the experts concluded that public awareness is necessary to address the challenges. The sad part is that there are only 800 psychiatric beds in different hospitals and 200 psychiatrics for attending those huge number of patients with only 0.05 percent of total health budget allocated for mental health services. So, government’s budgetary allocation and other logistic arrangements should be augmented for better services, and the Bangladesh Mental Health Act, 2014 must be passed immediately.
WHO experts prioritised the social aspect instead of medicine while providing counselling and treatment and The faculty members of psychology discipline laid emphasis on proper training for mental health practitioners.
It is high time that the government acknowledged that mental health is a very important issue which should not be set aside as ‘merely problems of the rich and Western countries’. It should also make provisions in the budget to support the improvement of the sector. A proper registration system should also be in place for all mental health practitioners so that the government can regulate the health practitioners and see whether their work is up to par. NGOs that are equipped should also make action plans that integrate the mentally ill or their treatment possibilities so that awareness can be raised amongst the common people so that counselling is no longer a taboo. We can no longer deny the existence of mental illnesses nor the necessity of treating it as millions of lives depend on it.
