Senate Tasks Ministry of Health On Mental Health Campaign

The Senate on Tuesday urged the Federal Ministry of Health and its states’ counterpart to embark on mental health awareness campaign.

This followed a motion by Sen. Oluremi Tinubu (APC-Lagos) on the need to ensure affordable mental healthcare for Nigerians at the plenary.

Worried by the rising spate of suicide and suicide attempts in the country, Tinubu, in the motion, said that societal ills, economic difficulty, crime among others drawbacks were sufficient to send anyone over the edge.

She, however, said that in spite of the issues that could induce suicide, Nigeria’s mental health support system was barely existent.

She said that access to mental health specialists was expensive and almost out-of-reach of the poor and middle class citizens.

“The effect is that where pressure becomes overbearing for these persons, they attack people around them or attempt to take their own lives.

“The incidents of these suicides are made worse by lack of attention and the belief that depression and other personality and mental disorders are the white man’s sickness and thus, does not affect Nigerians,” the lawmaker said.

She said that access to mental healthcare would ensure that the teeming number of psychology and psychiatric graduates across the country could put their knowledge to use and be gainfully employed.

In his contribution, Sen. Shehu Sani (APC-Kaduna) said, “there was a connection between the iniquity of the economic system with the mental health of our people.

“People attempt to take their lives; there is a dark cloud of guilt that hangs over us.

“This is our collective responsibility – those of us in position of leadership, it is our inability to strongly unfold the socio-economic system that will in every way prevent people from taking their lives.

“The economic indicators have shown clear widening gap between the rich and poor.’’