The Ministry of Health and the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) plan to roll out a new mental health policy.
Speaking at the Caribbean Youth Mental Health Webinar yesterday, senior consultant psychiatrist at the Psychiatric Hospital and vice president of the Barbados Association of Psychiatrists, Dr Brian MacLachlan, said that more young people were coming forward to seek treatment for their mental health.
“It’s clear, certainly in the last year that we were seeing a lot of children, adolescents, presenting to our treatment services and we are blaming that on the pandemic. Even though we are now on the tail end of the pandemic, we are still seeing a lot of young people presenting to our services with things like depression and suicide ideation [so] obviously the concern is very great,” he disclosed.
He explained how it showed the urgency for national intervention to improve the mental health of adolescents.
“The [current] policy just speaks to what do you want mental health to be, what you want it to look like and how do you treat it in terms of promotional activities, services and those sorts of things. The Government decided that they need to relook at mental health from the perspective of a policy and PAHO intends to do just that. [They will] look at the existing policy, the services we offer, look at the issues in the country as far as mental health is concerned and advise the Ministry of Health, and the Government by extension on the way forward,” Maclachlan noted.
Regional advisor on mental health at PAHO, Dr Claudina Cayetano, said a greater percentage of Caribbean countries needed to create policies that targeted teenagers.
“We continue to support Barbados in developing their roadmap for the mental health policy. This is very important because PAHO conducts, every two years, a survey into the Mental Health Atlas and one of the questions that we ask our countries is ‘Do they have a mental health policy for adolescents?’
“We know only 30 per cent of countries a year [say yes], so the majority of the countries say no, it doesn’t exist. It’s a gap and huge challenge because if we don’t have that policy-that guide-, [how will we know] what support, what guidance, what interventions are relevant? We need that,” she said. (RT)
