October 10th marks World Mental Health Day and to kick things off this evening, the Ministry of Health and Wellness planned a walk around the city, starting at the ITVET. Before the walk, they held a short ceremony to talk about the importance of observing this day. According to the Director of Public Health and Wellness, Dr Melissa Diaz, Belize is taking steps to try to fill in the gaps when it comes to treating mentally ill persons.
Dr. Melissa Diaz, Director of Public Health and Wellness
"The theme for this year is mental health, the access to mental health in catastrophes and emergencies. So we thought a good way to actually launch and to celebrate the day is of course we've asked everybody to wear green and we do see that we've received significant support from private sector, public sector, everybody's on their green and that brings awareness to this to mental health."
"But we've also done a short ceremony here today and we're going to do a walk, again just to ensure that we break down stigma that we continue to make to bring an awareness to our community and society about mental health illnesses and just to put it more on the forefront for people to feel easier to talk about the situations that they're in and not to be stigmatized."
"Over the last few years we've been able to fail a lot of our vacancies. We are currently now training new nurses in psychiatric care so we, I believe the number is 15 new nurses to become PNP's in the near future."
"We've helped to standardize the care that we give and improve our community outreach program and we're trying to roll out this community outreach program in every district because Belize district has a successful program."
"But in the other districts we also do mobile services, we visit persons in their homes and so if we strengthen these areas we feel that we would get less situations where we might have to go out looking for the acutely unwell."
"We're also in a very good stage at this point because we are reviewing and updating our mental health act and that has been months of working through the help of PAHO and working with our team, with other entities, with the police department."
"We have finally finished a draft update that we will now be utilizing the help of the AG ministry for us to really update the mental health act, look at our response to acute situations and ensure that everybody is educated on how to respond in acute situations."
"So that is very much something that we're happy that we are at this point and we hope that once this mental health act has been updated we'll be able to ensure that the entire community is aware of what the response should be."
