So the differences, the differences...where do I begin? I am not even going to mention the discrepancies in financial and human resource- that is obviously a given. Clearly the biggest difference is the lack of a functioning mental health act currently in Ghana, although as I may have mentioned previously, there is a new Bill trying to be passed through parliament at this very moment. As a western psychiatrist, you perhaps become habituated to the fact that mental health act legislation, and its guiding principles, form a solid framework for much of your daily decision making. And that isn’t to mention the amount of time we spend at tribunals, writing reports, reviewing sections etc. So what is it like when that legal framework isn’t there? The other day George, one of the MAs, asked me to come to the ward with him to review a patient. In short, she was a lady who had previously been given a diagnosis of delusional disorder, but due to the sustained deterioration in her social functioning and increasingly bizarre nature of her symptoms, we both agreed that schizophrenia was a more fitting diagnosis. Interesting, this lady had recently been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Europe, under the mental health act, but whilst on ward leave had managed to abscond and fly back home to Ghana; her relatives had helpfully sent us some information from this hospital admission. The lady had no insight, was delusional and paranoid, and had lost a considerable amount of weight over the previous few months, with an associated significant deterioration in her self-care. She was acutely unwell, putting her health at risk,  and she was very clear that she would not cooperate with treatment voluntarily; indeed, a concerted effort to engage her therapeutically during her previous admission had failed. I was clear in my mind that we should give her a chance to have a course of treatment and I knew that this would probably involve treating her against her will. But I found it very hard to make this decision alone, even when I knew that I was using the same legal framework as in the UK in my head. It felt precarious and a much more uncomfortable decision to make solo. We ended up discussing the case at the weekly multi-disciplinary case conference, which I have managed to re-start. The central question that we asked those assembled was “under what grounds can you justify detaining and treating a patient without their explicit consent?” It took the nurses and MAs quite a bit of prompting to come round to the themes of active mental disorder and acute risk to self, others and/or health. Several people suggested that lack of insight might be reason enough. 

Without a mental health act, patients do not get a say. And I am aware that any service users reading this might feel strongly that even with our mental health act, they still don’t get adequately heard. But here, you can be brought to hospital off the street as a “vagrant admission” and without any family to advocate for you, still find yourself in hospital 15 years later because you have nowhere else to go and nobody wondering very much why you have been in hospital for so long. You can be admitted to hospital on the whim of a judge who thinks that you “might be acting a bit strangely”, and again find yourself in a different kind of prison for an indefinite period. If your family admit you into hospital, and then decide that they can’t look after you any more, well, they just need to leave a false address and phone number, and then make themselves scarce, leaving you, the patient, with precious few options. That is, if your family can afford to bring you the long journey to hospital at all. So many times since I have been in Africa, I have reflected on the NHS and the services that we are able to provide. When I left the UK, the future of the NHS was the topic of ongoing fierce political debate and I know that this continues. It probably sounds like the most utterly clichéd and corny thing that somebody could say after working in a developing country, but maybe that is because it is true: we have literally no idea how good we have it.