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“or one in five South African children and teenagers suffer from a mental health condition. But only one in 10 children in South Africa have access to mental health care.”From the transcript
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Radio Islam — The Growing Crisis of Mental Health. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
or one in five South African children and teenagers suffer from a mental health condition. But only one in 10 children in South Africa have access to mental health care. Now let's be that only 10% of children struggling with mental health conditions, yet they care they need it. What is becoming a growing crisis that is not only a failure of the health care system but a violation of their human rights. We discussed about it with Dr. Stacy Oesh, who is a member of the South African Society of Psychiatrists or Sesson. Dr. Stacy, good morning to you. Good morning. Dr. Stacy, you know what I saw you last day when my producer had been over to me. I insisted it was the German oops, but she's telling you though it's Oesh. I think you better put this to rest between both of us. What do you think Dr. Stacy? Don't worry, you're not alone. It is for dance to Oesh. Okay. It is an unusual one.
Thank you, Dr. Stacy Oesh for joining us. You know, getting into our discussion, Dr. Stacy, globally 50% of lifetime mental health disorders actually begin by age 14, sometimes even sooner. But it's just basically a life sentence of mental health problems, stretching from an old 14 well into adulthood. Do you think it's not properly addressed? You know, no, it definitely highlights the need for early intervention to ensure that children are able to realise their full potential. It also allows for mental distress and struggles to be addressed at a point before they merge into feminine disorders that persist into adulthood and into the rest of their lives without full without proper treatment. This really does prevent them realising their full potential and also limits the quality of life going into adulthood. You know, Dr. Stacy has started to collaborate
human rights day on Saturday. A Saturday is coming weekend. Sasok has warned the chronic underfunding and neglect of mental health care represents a failure of children. In what way he said, how are we failing children by failing to provide proper adequate health care mental health care in particular? You know, where there is underfunding? There is under-resourcing in community-based settings and this does limit us in implementing what is set out in the National Mental Health Policy Framework and Strategic Plan, which is essentially a road map for the implementation of community-based care. With limited resources, we are unable to provide adequate community-based care and with specialist psychiatric child and adolescent care being very much limited to hearting and Cape Town by and large,
I mean, we are talking about the only being about 40 child and adolescent sub-specialists across South Africa. And so service provision cannot be under only those 40 specialists across the country where services are limited to particularly two provinces. And so the shift in thinking to the community-based model is a really... Resourcing, it will, you know... Yeah, Dr. Stacey, you don't want it to look at the solution. Even if government, the department had to start as of today, as of Thursday today, I mean, where will it start? Will there be a need for counselors to be appointed to schools to ensure that children get mental health and then, you know, cases that obviously they would have to refer to a system about them, they would have to inevitably do so. But will you have to start at that grassroots level
that every school would have a council also sort? I think that I think you're quite right and I think that, and that would certainly be part of it, that talking again about the resource thing, I think it would have to start in something like a school setting for early intervention to occur. And that would require a certain amount of training for teachers and almost allowing for extended school health care services. But the funding would need to create capacity in their schools. We wouldn't want it to overload an already overburdened system and teachers that already overworked. So that's certainly not what we would be suggesting. But if we were able to create greater capacity for early intervention and screening at a school level, where there are health services that provide early intervention and screening at this level.
And school counselors is certainly a point of contact that is more equitable to all children across South Africa. And with schooling being compulsory up to grade nine, it does give us that window of time where there is a high incidence of mental health disorders emerging. So it does give us a window where we are able to access and screen for those disorders at that point. And so I definitely think that focusing on schools is a really, really important focus. But creating capacity is definitely key.
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