The state of mental healthcare in the Developing World is pretty poor.
There is a kind of powerful, almost demonic relationship between poverty and mental illness.
Imagine a situation where between 80 and 90 percent of the potential client group
is not able to reach decent help.
Three out of four mentally ill people live in poor countries, like Ghana,
where access to care is especially challenging in rural areas.
About seventy percent of Ghana is living in the rural areas.
and conditions there are certainly quite harsh.
You have schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorders, anxiety disorders.
For a whole country of 25 million people, we have about 14 psychiatrists,
and that translates to about one psychiatrist per two million people.
So, from the point of view of a mentally ill person,
to be able to access effective treatment is a challenge.
There is no question about that.
And that's the challenge that we want to meet.
To do so, BasicNeeds is pioneering a new, community-based model of mental healthcare.
BasicNeeds provides a system where there hasn't been a system before.
It is low cost and sustainable on very, very scarce human resources.
BasicNeeds, as an NGO, does not deliver service itself directly,
but they ensure services get to the grassroots.
Those services focus not only on mental health, but also on economic and social wellbeing.
To provide them, BasicNeeds works with existing government ministries and other agencies,
training doctors, nurses and community volunteers, to fill the mental healthcare gap.
The first thing is to identify those people who are skilled professionals,
and we then have to use those professionals optimally,
to help us to train others,
for example in the recognition of mental illness,
so to train healthcare workers, development workers, village healthcare workers.
We're shifting the task that would otherwise be with a specialist
onto people who are non-specialized but who, nevertheless, have authority.
BasicNeeds trained Sodsar Taawele, a community nurse,
to diagnose and support people like school teacher, Francis Kubilla.
Several years before they met, Kubilla had begun to exhibit erratic and violent behaviour.
This led the village's traditional healer to lock him up.
His family particularly thought that he was a danger to himself and to the community,
especially his wife and children.
This is a gentleman who probably has quite an important psychosis or schizophrenia.
He'd been locked down in his own home.
Now, when I say 'locked down', I mean his leg had been pinioned in a large log.
A hole had been bored through the trunk,
the leg had been inserted into the hole.
Then they used some nails to lock it,
so that the leg could not come out.
So I had to be sitting there, naked like that.
Defecation, eating, urine and everything was where I was.
The log was set to have some spiritual powers to help in his healing
and that was the reason why the traditional healer had put his leg in the log.
Kubilla's family left him attached to the log for two years.
And this is very typical of what happens to people where mental illness is ill-understood.
[Kubilla teaching in a classroom]
Kubilla was finally released,
because the community nurse's training helped him recognize what the village healer had not:
that Kubilla had a treatable psychosis.
The nurse gave Kubilla medicine that improved his condition quickly.
BasicNeeds then helped him find a new teaching position.
Our goal is to get people back into work.
To do that, BasicNeeds has developed unique apprenticeship programs
that have equipped thousands of people with the skills they need to make a living.
For example, we negotiate land from traditional chieftains,
and the land is then used for training people or re-training them in agriculture.
And that apprenticeship structure, which is quite common in Africa,
is one of the ways in which we can really get people back into employment.
[Kubilla teaching]
It's crucial to not only mere survival, but also to the reduction of stigma,
which means that you get accepted back into society.
[Kubilla teaching]
You cannot imagine all these ordeals you go through.
I don't want to mostly remember them,
but it cannot be cut out from my mind.
But I got relief when I was released.
As a family man, if I am not working, how would I be able to feed these lives?
We have reached out to people in their families, in their homes, in their workplaces,
to say mental illness is not what you think.
It is what anyone can experience
and that there are ways by which you can manage your mental illness
and live a productive life.
They've been helping to demystify mental health and that has actually helped
to remove some of the barriers and discrimination.
When I started the organization, we started with a blank sheet of paper.
Now, there's well over 108 thousand people who have been through our program.
It's a drop in the ocean, but the ocean's very big.