Poverty plays a major role in preventing poor mentally ill people from getting help.

Poverty is a barrier to treatment. In desperately poor families, everyone’s income is vital to keeping the family ‘pot’ full. If someone can no longer contribute to the family income, then this can force the family to the brink of poverty. If that person then become a drain on resources by requiring money for transport, medication or traditional healers, then this can become too much and the mentally ill person is then regarded as an unsustainable burden on resources.

In this situation, we find that the good will and help shown toward the mentally ill person by their family and community can rapidly disappear as they come to realise that the illness is not going to go away, and that the mentally ill person is endangering the survival of the whole family.

Inevitably, some families choose to get rid of the burden on their resources by expelling the mentally ill person from the home and leaving them to become a destitute person who wanders the streets: a source of ridicule and abuse.

Other families may dump the mentally ill person in a psychiatric hospital, leaving them there without even visiting them for the rest of their life – sometimes forty or fifty years. Others choose to leave them with a traditional healer, leaving them to look after the mentally ill person.

Ahmed Abdulai is a mentally ill man living in Northern Ghana. Due to his illness, his family cast him out from his home. With nowhere to go, he just wandered the streets. When we came across him, he was living in a grave yard.

Destitution is a common problem for mentally ill people in Northern Ghana. As a response to this, we’ve developed a day centre called ‘Ti Sampa’ (meaning ‘Our Meeting Place’) where destitute mentally ill people can come for food, clothes, a wash and some company.

Mental illnesses cannot be addressed alone in isolation, the poverty of the mentally ill person and their family must be tackled simultaneously with their illness.