Hundreds of mentally ill people and their carers queued for hours to see a psychiatrist at the five-day outreach clinics organised by BasicNeeds in Northern Ghana.

Outreach clinics have sought to bring treatment closer to mentally ill people and offer them the chance to get treatment that otherwise would have been completely inaccessible for them. Normally, mentally ill people are required to travel long distances at great expense to receive treatment. For this reason, any outreach treatment we offer is usually overwhelmed by mentally ill people seeking treatment.

Dr. J. B. Asare, the Psychiatrist who worked on the outreach programme said, "A total of 226 mentally ill people were consulted and given treatment. It seems that people suffering from epilepsy are attending the clinics and for most of them, their conditions have been largely controlled through the use of anticonvulsants."

"It was obvious that a lot of the patients defaulted in their treatment due to shortage of drugs and their inability to afford the cost of transport to the clinic centres to have their conditions reviewed regularly."

"There were also vagrant persons suffering from mental illness in the villages that we did not visit. I think that in the future, we need to spend some time during the outreach to talk to relatives about the need for their involvement in the management of the conditions of the mentally ill people."

"Some of the patients reviewed during my last visit have recovered and it was really encouraging to see the smiles on the faces of their relatives who accompanied them. They were delighted to be receiving treatment right in their communities."

Through outreach clinics we can offer real, life-changing treatment to mentally ill people; a service that has either been unavailable or inaccessible to them in the past. Without community-based treatment, poor mentally ill people will continue to live with an illness that is often easily treatable.

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