Training of the Non-Psychiatrists for Mental Health Care, the Nigerian Situation

Abstract

Despite great changes taking place in many parts of the developing world, it remains true that modern psychiatric care is available only on a very limited scale. Millions of people, particularly in rural areas, have no access to psychiatric clinics. Psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses are concentrated in large towns, usually centred on mental hospitals, where their skills and knowledge are available only to a minority [Harding, 1975]. In Nigeria, rapid socio-economic changes of the last ten years or so had resulted in staggering rural-urban migration. This in turn has led to the breaking up of traditional family ties, development of city slums and their attendant social pathologies like drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, an obvious increase in the number of vagrant psychotics, etc. The present world-wide economic recession has confounded an already precarious social order to the extent that mental health problems are seen by many as assuming a public health dimension.