Living in rural areas can make it very difficult to get help for mental illnesses. Some communities are very remote and often vast distances must be travelled to get help and treatment.

What’s more, because mental health services have been ignored and under-funded, mental health care is often only available in capital cities. For example, all of Ghana’s four public sector psychiatrists live in the capital Accra, right in the south of the country, and Ghana's three psychiatric hospitals are also located in the south.

For desperately poor people, the cost of transport to these services can simply be too much. For this reason, these people seek care closer to home from traditional healers.

Psychiatric services are usually centralised in developing countries. This means that psychiatric medication isn’t dispensed at local health centres in rural areas. To get regular supplies of medication, mentally ill people have to keep travelling long and expensive distances back to the limited psychiatric services.

For example, Somoe Hussein lives in remote rural Tanzania. After the death of her husband she developed bi-polar affective disorder. She started to behave very strangely, collecting rubbish, shouting at people and her leaving her home in the middle of the night.

Her father took her to Ligual Regional Hospital, which was a very long way from their home. After a stay on the general ward she was admitted to the small psychiatric ward where she was diagnosed and she received treatment.

She was soon discharged from hospital with a small supply of medication and told that she had to come back to the Regional Hospital to get her next course of treatment.

Unfortunately, Somoe couldn’t go back to the hospital after she finished her medication. There was no public transport from her tiny mud-hut village to the hospital and to take private transport was far too expensive for her.

Without medication, Somoe’s illness came back.

Determined not to see his daughter suffer, Somoe’s father, Hussein Khamis, jumped on his bike and rode to the long distance to the Regional Hospital to collect her medication for her. He regularly undertook this gruelling task to make sure that his daughter was well provided for.

Somoe is very thankful of her father’s efforts. She said, “My father is the anchor of my life. At his age, he tirelessly goes for my medication.”

That was until BasicNeeds arrived. By setting up a mental health outreach clinic, medication and care can be administered in people’s communities so that mentally ill people don’t have to make long and difficult journeys to get help.

What’s more, the treatment’s now free, too.

Somoe’s father says, “It is difficult to travel such a long distance to the Regional Hospital to collect my daughter’s medication. I used to pay US $7 for it. Now I am told I don’t have to travel to the hospital or pay anything for the medication. I am very grateful to BasicNeeds.”