What’s called an Acute Mental Health Day Care Center was opened today at the back of the Port Loyola Health Center. But it’s not some improvised facility; it’s a major structure funded with money from the health reform project. But more than just a new 900 square foot, $300,000 building, Psychiatrist Claudina Cayetano says it should make a meaningful difference in the lives of mental patients and the city community.
Dra. Claudina Cayetano, Psychiatrist
“This clinic will be used by patients that have severe mental illness, meaning that they have for example schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, depression, patients that have illnesses that they require rehabilitation. So you just can’t give them the medication and send them home so they require group therapy and different types of therapy to help them to recover.”
Jules Vasquez,
Will a clinic like this assist in seeing less mental disease events in the public, on the streets?
Dra. Claudina Cayetano,
“That’s the hope and that is my dream because if you don’t know someone that has a mental illness, just by seeing them, it has to hurt you. Hurt you as a human being just to see how a life can be wasted and they wander on the street aimlessly and so what we want is not just that we give them an injection, not that they just get medication, but can we bring them back to be able to engage with them and see how best we can help them to give them some meaning in their life because we have been doing before is that if they are sick we give them treatment and when they are well we send them home. But sometimes there are no homes and if there is no home, there is nothing else to do in the daytime so where would they go, on the street. And then because they are not taking their treatment, then they start to get sick again and then there is not that insight to know that they are sick and they need to go back for treatment."
The Ministry of Health also used the opportunity to launch a mental health training manual for police officers. It’s an important document because police officers often come in contact with mentally ill persons when they are in the grips of their illness and have to use restraint to not treat it as criminal behavior. Cayetano underlined its importance.
Dra. Claudina Cayetano,
“Its not a one sided project. We work together, we had discussions, and that’s very important because they are there to serve and protect and we are there to provide treatment. So how do we use our roles to do a better job, and that was the most challenging one because the people call for the police most times and we don’t want to go because we need them to go with us because sometimes some patients may be aggressive and violent and even though we may have the treatment, we may not have the police manpower that is required to be able to subdue the individual. And at the same time we do not want to treat them like criminals because they are not criminals, they are people with mental disorders. So it was how to balance that, I guess we had to do together and I have hopes. I don’t think that with that, what we’re doing now is going to clean up all the streets of Belize, that is dream and my wish, but we at least we’re starting and this is a good project both of us have been working on.”
A policy handbook for mental health treatment is the next project.
