In places where there are no mental health and medical services available, the first point of call for many people in seeking help for complaints are traditional or faith healers. In Africa over 80% of people seek treatment primarily from traditional healers. This makes traditional healers a vital first line in identifying people with mental illnesses who are in need of treatment.

People visit traditional healers to get treatment for their problems and often live with the traditional healer whilst undergoing treatment. Ashamed of the mentally ill person, family members often dump the mentally ill person on the healer and don’t return for months on end, if at all.

Traditional healers have some successes with mental illnesses, such as depression, as their treatments often involve talking through problems and in many ways are similar to counselling. However, for many mental illnesses traditional healers’ treatments are not effective and many resort to chaining mentally ill people to control their sometimes violent and destructive behaviour.

In Ghana and Uganda especially, we work in collaboration with traditional healers to help them deliver better treatment. We provide them with essential equipment such as buckets and blankets to improve the conditions that mentally ill people live in whilst they are undergoing treatment.

We also work to help traditional healers with the treatment of mentally ill people that their methods are not effective in treating. Rather than simply snipping the chains that would later be reapplied as soon as we left, we work over a longer process to treat the mentally ill person first, in collaboration with the traditional healer. Through this process we show the healer that there are alternative and effective methods of treatment and that they can play a part in helping that mentally ill person get back to a normal life.