ABOUT THE PROJECT
The Problem Space in key points and statistics
In Ghana, mental health disorders contribute significantly to years lived with disability. The disability index is greater than that of HIV, nutritional deficiencies and neurological disorders. Of which a whooping 23.3% of the number of mental health cases are severe. Interestingly, underfunding remains the order of the day, with a meager 1.3% of the Ghanaian health expenditure budget allocated to mental health, while 70% of healthcare is provided by traditional healers in communities.
When the conversation of treatment arises in religious circles, the responsibility is taken up by faith healers ; with an emphasis on prayer, holy water, candles, oils, and herbal medicines as remedies. Though healers acknowledge that causative agents vary from supernatural forces, to drug abuse, and road traffic accidents; there are still erroneous beliefs that mental disorders are synonymous with psychosis.
Credit: Dr. Rivk Wolthusen.
This project seeks to offer decentralized mental health care working with health care professions and religious institutions since there is an overwhelming lack of collaboration between these two parties. Our approach connects mental health care and spiritual wellbeing in form of so-called “Brain Spirit Desks” (BSD). As part of the BSD project, we use design thinking to train spiritual leaders from different religious institutions and focal persons (community members) in each spiritual center to help in early identification of cases, provide humane modern care and timely referral to mental health professionals. This project is part of an Erasmus+ engagement that seeks to build a team of 3-4 students working with their German colleagues over the next year.
ABOUT THE MENTORS
Taye
Emmanuel Taye is the Design Lab Mobile Mentor for this year’s Mental Health project, as well as the Flood Project. He is a research assistant at University of Ghana, Centre for African Wetlands, and also the 2019 Winner of the International Wader Study Group Small Grants for his project on Breeding ecology and foraging behavior of Black-winged stilts in Ghana.
Rick
Dr. Rick Wolthusen founded The e.V. It’s vision is to empower local communities to take charge of their well being and mental health. He became a Cheng Fellow in 2019 and Graduated from Harvard Kennedy school in 2020 with a masters in Public policy. He will be working with the D:Lab to implement the Mental Health Project.
ABOUT THE TEAM
The team is made up of ten tenacious volunteers from universities across Africa.
THE JOURNEY
"This is a design project like most D:Lab projects. This means, it needs to follow a process of problem analysis, research, analysis, ideation, prototyping and presentation" - Dr. Gordon Adomdza
June 4th 2021
The introductory meeting for the Mental Health project took place on this day. For functional outreach and engagement, a social media campaign was put into the works.
"The focus of the project is to offer decentralized mental health care by engaging health care professions and religious and spiritual institutions with the aim to ensure early identification of cases, provision of humane modern care and timely referral to mental health professionals." -
Engineer Kwabena Akuffo, D:Lab Coordinator.
June 10th 2021
On this day, factors contributing to mental health struggles were discussed. Amongst them are financial instability, lack of funds for treatment, widespread entrenchment of religious perspectives to mental health, which often are not best practices, and pressure on religious leaders. Key Stakeholders were identified as traditional and spiritual leaders, mental healthcare professionals, persons in need of mental health assistance, family and friends of such persons, and the Government.
An amazing concept was introduced, in which team members were asked to continually recommend resources for the discourse, by sharing relevant publications on the topic. This is tagged as "Literary review". Team members would also document the number of religious institutions and mental health facilities in their neighborhood, as a contribution to research statistics for presentations.
July 9th 2021
As part of the activities of the project, a mental health expert, Dr Dei-Asamoa was invited to interact with the students and provide information from the field of professional mental health care provision. The meeting, which was also held virtually, helped the students have a deeper understanding and appreciation for the state of mental health care in Ghana.
Below are the recommended resources:
Mental Health, Religion & Culture by Simon Dein.
Simon Dein (2020) Religious healing and mental health, Mental Health,
Religion & Culture, 23:8, 657-665, DOI: 10.1080/13674676.2020.1834220
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2020.1834220
Mental and Physical Health and spiritual Healing: An Evaluation of Complementary Religious Therapies provided by Sprirtist Centers in the City of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Alessandra Lamas Granero Lucchetti(2015)
Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Cult Med Psychology, DOI 10.1007/s11013-015-9478-z
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