Yesterday my co-worker and I went on home visits to do
contact tracing with the co-workers for someone who has Tuberculosis. That means giving health education about TB and also investigating whether or not any of the co-workers have symptoms of TB. This
particular person is very infectious and has only been on treatment for three
days (the first two weeks of treatment the patient is still very contagious).
On
the way back we went to visit a few patients at their homes, as the health
educators here often do. We entered the yard of a man who is a psych patient at
the clinic. We found he wasn’t home, there were only young kids at the house
unattended. My co-worker told me this morning that the psychiatric patient was
actually home and in the house, and a couple hours after we were looking for
him to check-in, he went into the bush and hanged himself with a soft wire. His
mother found him later in the afternoon yesterday.
Psychiatric support at home and at the medical facilities
in this country is severely lacking. There is one psychiatric hospital in the
very southern-most corner of the country where all of the resources are for the
most part. We have a psych nurse at my clinic who has just arrived, but the
problem is the patients rarely come and see him. There’s never transport for
him to follow-up with the patients, so as a result they often don’t get the
help they need through counseling or medications. Occurrences like this are not
uncommon.
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