Over 800 persons believed to be living with mental health conditions are homeless and loitering within the central business area of the Tamale metropolis of the Northern Region.
According to Basic Needs Ghana, a mental health advocacy organization which conducted this research, this paints a picture of a possible volatile situation that may be hanging on neck of the country.
“We have come into contact with over 800 people who are homeless within the Tamale business district area. We haven’t even gone to the outskirts. So that tells you that if we go wider, we may be thinking of triple, quadruple numbers of this 800 people we have reached. They are being assessed to know the kind of support they will need. So, if you multiply that by the number of metropolitan and municipal and towns we have, then we are running into several hundreds of thousands of people”- said Peter Yaro, Executive Director of the Basic Needs Ghana.
Worryingly, Ghana is dealing with a treatment gap of about 90 percent of mental health issues making the situation even more complicated.
Speaking to 3News.com on the sidelines of the Annual Scientific Meeting of key local and international partners championed by the NIHR Global Health Research Group on Homelessness and Mental Health in Africa (HOPE), Peter Yaro said “Data of the Ghana Health Service also indicate that over 200 homeless people with severe mental illness were treated” in 2024.
This number represents “less than ten percent of the people who actually need services because in Ghana we have a treatment gap of as high as 90 percent, meaning out of ten people who require services, maybe only two are able to have it.”
He bemoaned the seeming lack of political will to address mental health issues considering that “the manifestos of the NDC, NPP and Movement for Change…. gave very little attention to mental health. The NPP talked about completing psychiatric facilities around while the NDC simply said improve mental health infrastructure and very little from the movement for change and that is very disappointing.”
To drive home change, the Director of the organization which has provided support to over 185,000 vulnerable persons with mental health conditions in the last 20 years said “we are engaging with the new government of the National Democratic Congress led by President John Mahama to relook at the aspect of mental health.”
According to him, the organization wants three things which are, “enhance funding for mental health at the primary health level not only psychiatric hospitals which are just three and seeing limited numbers, develop the mental health workforce to ensure proper deployment across all parts of the country and ensure the inclusion of people with mental health conditions in social-economic activities including free support for the national health insurance registration, disability funds for people with mental health conditions.”
