Editorial of the Daily Searchlight of Wednesday, 17th August 2022
Dr Collins Agyemang Badu, National President, Ghana Psychological Association (GPA), says Ghana is currently experiencing a “mental health inflation.”
He attributed the problem to stress, anxiety, and loss of jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic; the increase in crime, violence amongst the youth and high level of unemployment, amongst others.
Dr Badu said in terms of policy making and budgetary allocations at the national level, much was needed to be done to strengthen the relevance of psychological health in Ghana.
He said this on Monday during the launch of the Ghana Psychology Week 2022 in Accra.
The Daily Searchlight believes that the causes of the scenario painted by Dr Collins Agyemang Badu can be attributed to one sole causative factor, the lack of social and economic progress in Ghana.
We believe that there are two ways policy makers and implementers can approach the problem; that is before the fact, or after the fact of mental illness.
We believe that the nation would make greater progress and create greater benefits if we were to look at all the factors raised, and to seek a holistic approach to addressing the factors leading to the incidence of the occurrence of greater mental health among Ghanaians.
In our opinion, this would be much more beneficial, than waiting to cure people after they have broken down from the stress.
This would mean that the government commits resources towards economic transformation of the citizenry, instead of creating facilities to house them when they have broken down mentally.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Wednesday, 17th August, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
