Making Mental Health Care accessible to the people

Make mental health care accessible to the people

According to the World Health Organization, mental and neurological disorders cause, more than 12.5% of cases recorded worldwide morbidity. One in six patients in Africa is a mental, neurological or behavioral. All individuals with these disorders suffer twice: due to the effects of the disease on the one hand and secondly because of the stigma and social discrimination.

However, the general health services that provide care for populations with little or no care at all involved in mental health. At the community level, for example, care is almost non-existent because of the lack of mental health specialists. Or mental disorders are a major cause of debilitating diseases in the world and especially in low-income countries such as Burkina Faso. This is to deal with this issue as the World Health Organization has developed a program of action ”fill gaps in mental health interventions" to fight against mental, neurological disorders and those related to the use of psychoactive substance in non-specialized care Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) .

CBM in Burkina Faso and its partners through the ”Mental Health for All" program (2013-2017) have invested in the training of nurses for the care of mental disorders. Recall that guide intervention mhGAP had been contextualization in June 2013 by a group of Burkina experts Francophone West Africa.

The complementary of actions

The guide is therefore suitable reference document for the training of Special and non-specialist mental health staff
The goal is to integrate mental health care in the provision of health services by the peripheral health structures.
To date, more than 600 specialists and non-specialists were trained in this guide through several training sessions organized by the staff of the National Mental Health Program of the Ministry of Health of Burkina Faso.

However, health workers are not the only ones concerned by the mhGAP. Indeed, the mhGAP guide describes the ideal conditions for tenders mental health (work organization, equipment, drugs ...) and social actors (awareness, orientation, patient monitoring) to invest there.