100 graduate in Quality Rights for Mental Health training

A HUNDRED persons graduated after completing a Quality Rights training on mental health recovery and community inclusion which started in January this year.

By Kudakwashe Pembere

The training equips the general citizenry as well as professionals in the handling of persons with lived mental health experiences.

It comes at a time when stigma stereotyping of people with psychosocial disabilties is still rife in the community and even some public health facilities.

World Health Organization (WHO) Zimbabwe focal person for mental health Dr Debra Machando said the course is a recovered base program meant to change the stereotypes associated with people with lived mental health experiences.

“We are just coming out of a celebration of the people who completed the Quality Rights Training Program. It is a program with six modules which teach people on how to treat people with lived experiences for mental so that they can recover well. So it is actually a recovery based program for the community,” she said.

There are many misconceptions on people with lived mental health experiences, Dr Machando said which this Quality Rights training tries to address.

“You notice that in our environment there are a lot of misconceptions about people who are mentally ill, people who live with mental health conditions for example they get treated harshly, shouted at, abused, violence, verbal abuse and also suspicion on what they might do.

“In one of the things that is common, when someone has got a mental health condition, people have misconceptions to think that person cannot make decisions for themselves, they do not know what is happening and a lot of people are actually living with mental health conditions, depression, anxiety, anyone can suffer from mental conditions. It does not mean they lose their faculty for making decisions, for living like any other person.

“So the training teaches people to normalize living with mental health conditions and also help them appreciate that people can get treatment and can lead normal lives like anybody else and should be treated in the comfort of their homes and not be bundled to live in some isolated places.

“We are hoping that this training that people have done, which we did with people with disabilities, who are also vulnerable and likely to be isolated and to be treated as if they do not have decision making capacities,” Dr Machando said.

Dr Machando said people with psychosocial disabilities must be treated with dignity.

“So we are hoping this training is going to be cascaded and with time we are going to see a transformation of how people are handled. The aim is in short for people with lived mental health experiences to be treated with dignity, respect and that they take part in their treatment. Make choices of what is good for them because they are the ones who are living with these conditions,” she said.

A person with disability Ms Memory Mutero said the course helped her to know that persons with disabilities also deal with psychosocial disabilities.

“This course informed me of psychosocial disabilities which I didn’t know of as a person who is physically challenged. It has capacitated me to even train other persons with disabilities in my community on psychosocial disabilities and those without.

“There were some sections which were a bit difficult but I managed to pull through.  In hospitals people with psychosocial disabilities and even those with disabilities face harassment, abuse and some form of ill treatment. It just depends on those you would have met on a certain day. There may be good days and bad days. Some health workers haven’t fully understood disability issues,” she said.

Another participant in this training who is a mental health practitioner at the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services said the course offered her an opportunity to look at quality rights in a new way.

“It has now allowed me to look at other aspects of treatment in terms of quality rights. So it has enlightened me and broadened my views in terms of treatment in mental health. Some things in our country are not well defined in terms of treatment as put in the quality rights training but I think with time it is going to be adaptable to the Quality Rights training. I hope I will be able to apply it because at the moment I don’t see how we can change the policies. But with time as more people will be learning about this, how we use quality rights is going to improve,” she said.

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