Accra Psychiatric Hospital is Overcrowded…With Healthy Patients?

February 21st, 2008 · No Comments

Accra Psychiatric Hospital’s medical director, Dr. Akwasi Osei, has called upon Ghana’s Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to force the Ghana Police Service to deal with throngs of patients living in substandard conditions in the hospital. This isn’t exactly news. The hospital, originally constructed to hold 200, now holds more than a thousand. Patients are brought in by the courts, their families, and some even walk off the street and admit themselves. Most eat one meal a day and more than half sleep on the floor due to a lack of beds. However, Dr. Osei has gone on to say that many patients at the hospital have been deemed mentally fit by staff and ready to integrate back into society. The problem is that many of them have nowhere to go, and thus are forced to stay within the confines of the hospital. According to Dr. Osei, the situation is becoming increasingly dire. I went with JOY NEWS reporter Bernard Saibu to the hospital to speak with Dr. Osei and some of the patients in the “Special Ward” - built for 60 patients and holding 218. 150 of them are considered mentally healthy. We asked the patients - who immediately began lining up in droves to tell their stories - whether they were ready to leave the hospital, and why they couldn’t. Their nurse, Atchoo, stood by us watchfully as we spoke. Although neither of us are mental health experts, most of the patients we spoke to were lucid and seemed self-sufficient, and this was confirmed by the nurses. Some told us they had been sent to the hospital after committing a crime while high on weed or drunk, and this was enough evidence to put their mental health in doubt. The stigma surrounding the mentally ill in Ghana isn’t as strong as in other African countries, but it’s there, in vernacular and in practice. You can see it in the way government officials - educated men living in the 21st century - refer to sick people living on the street as “lunatics” or “madmen.” More troublingly, you can see it in the faces of these abandoned men. Even if you’re considered healthy by medical experts, the stain of mental illness persists, driving away friends and family who have been shamed by your condition. As my colleague conducted some interviews in Twi, I looked around the ward - a single open-air room where the male patients circled about, bathed, or sat quietly listening to the radio. Occasionally arguments erupted around the room, while other men slept on sheets on the floor. One patient told us that although he felt fine, the claustrophobic environment of the ward sometimes made him want to kill himself. His brother used to come to visit but has not returned for some time. “I don’t understand,” he told us. “Why does he make me wait here? I want to go home.” After he finished speaking, he quietly thanked us, shook our hands and returned to a bench near the middle of the room. He joined a group of men sitting and listening to the radio. None of them spoke. We went back to the station where Saibu filed this report.

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