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Disability Inclusion Helpdesk Report : What works in mental health services and community interventions to support people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities: a rapid evidence review

MILLS, China
AHLENBÄCK, Veronica
HAEGEMAN, Emma
September 2019

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Summaries on the findings from the following queries:

What works to develop quality services and community interventions to support people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities and wellbeing for all, across the lifecycle?

What are examples of effective interventions in this area?

African Disability Rights Yearbook volume 5 2017

NGWENA, Charles
et al
2017

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This volume of the African Disability Rights Yearbook is divided into four sections presenting articles, country reports, commentaries on regional developments and a book review. The first section A of the journal presents a number of articles on issues affecting people with disabilities in Africa, ranging from education and rights of children with disabilities to albinism. Section B presents country reports on Djibouti and Madagascar. Section C presents two articles: one on mental health and the other on disability rights developments in the East African Community post-2012. Finally a review of E. Barnes’s 2016 book "The minority body: A theory of disability" is given.

 

Improving Ghana’s mental healthcare through task-shifting-psychiatrists and health policy directors perceptions about government’s commitment and the role of community mental health workers

AGYAPONG, Vincent
et al
October 2016

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The aim of this study was to examine the perceptions of psychiatrists and health policy directors about the policy to expand mental health care delivery in Ghana through a system of task-shifting from psychiatrists to community mental health workers (CMHWs). A self-administered semi-structured questionnaire was developed and administered to 11 psychiatrists and 29 health policy directors. Key informant interviews were also held with five psychiatrists and four health policy directors. .

Globalization and Health (2016) 12:57

DOI 10.1186/s12992-016-0199-z

Beneath the rhetoric: Policy to reduce the mental health treatment gap in Africa

COOPER, Sara
2015

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In this paper I problematize knowledge on reducing the ‘gap’ in treatment produced by 14 national mental health policies in Africa. To contextualize this analysis, I begin with a historic-political account of the emergence of the notion of primary health care and its entanglement within decolonization forces of the 1960s. I unpack how and why this concept was subsequently atrophied, being stripped of its more revolutionary sentiments from the 1980s. Against this backdrop, I show how, although the 14 national mental health policies are saturated with the rhetoric of primary health care and associated concepts of community participation and ownership, in practice they tend to marginalize local meaning-systems and endorse a top-down framework heavily informed by colonial medicine. The policies thus end up reproducing many of the very Eurocentric assumptions that the original primary health care notion sought to transcend. More specifically, the paradigms of evidence-based research/practice and individualised human rights become the gatekeepers of knowledge. These two paradigms, which are deeply embedded within contemporary global mental health discourse, are legislating what are legitimate forms of knowing, and by extension, valid forms of care. I argue that a greater appreciation of the primary health care concept, in its earliest formulation, offers a potentially fruitful terrain of engagement for developing more contextually-embedded and epistemologically appropriate mental health policies in Africa. This in turn might help reduce the current ‘gap’ in mental health care treatment so many countries on the continent face.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 3

Like a death sentence : abuses against persons with mental disabilities in Ghana

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
2012

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"Focusing on the southern parts of the country, this report examines the experiences of persons with mental disabilities in Ghana in the three main environments in which they receive care: the broader community, the country’s three public psychiatric hospitals, and residential prayer camps...Human Rights Watch found that persons with mental disabilities in Ghana often experience a range of human rights abuses in the prayer camps and hospitals that Human Rights Watch researchers visited. These patients are ostensibly sent to these institutions by their family members, police, or their communities for help. Abuses are taking place despite the fact that Ghana has ratified a number of international human rights treaties, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which was ratified in July 2012. These abuses include denial of food and medicine, inadequate shelter, involuntary medical treatment, and physical abuse amounting to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment"
The report is available in pdf, easy to read and html formats

From many lands

NARAYAN, Deepa
PETESCH, Patti
Eds
2002

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This book presents the experiences of people who are worn down by persistent deprivation, and buffeted by severe shocks they feel ill-equipped to overcome. The stories reveal some of the reasons why poor people remain poor, despite working long hours day after day. They document the frequently demeaning encounters with state, market and civic institutions that distort the well-intended political, economic and social policies. This book focuses on the diversity of poverty in 14 countries and highlights the key findings

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