Psychologist Shawn Clarke is urging the Government to incorporate the existing services of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in efforts to address the whopping increase in mental health cases since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The founder and director of Supreme Counselling for Personal Development made the suggestion in response to a recent disclosure by Minister of Health Dr the Most Honourable Jerome Walcott that the number of Barbadians seeking assistance for mental health issues had risen more than 200 per cent in the last three years.
Speaking in the Senate last week, Minister Walcott acknowledged that given those statistics, “we need to look at public education and the stigma associated with mental health illness, [and] we need to look at community mental health”.
“We need to integrate it totally into the polyclinic system. We are expanding the numbers of psychiatrists and counselling psychologists in the community because we need to move it into the community,” he had said.
While agreeing that was “a positive move”, Clarke emphasised the need for the Government to utilise services and programmes which smaller NGOs have already started.
“Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, there are a number of organisations in Barbados, like Supreme Counselling, who have been offering such services to the community, and we are on the ground. So, we know the people, we know where they are at, [and] we know the persons who would really need to access the services,” he told Barbados TODAY.
“We have to make these services readily available to the community and we also need to make it free of cost so that persons who need to access the services can do so.
“So it’s a good initiative but I think they need to collaborate more with the non-governmental organisations to access those services,” he added.
Clarke identified an initiative his NGO started in February under which he said its services have been decentralised and work is being done with specific communities, including The Pine, St Michael and Mason Hall Street,The City.
The psychologist told Barbados TODAY that given the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the statistics revealed by the Health Minister were not surprising.
“If I cast my mind as far back as the beginning of COVID when we had our first shutdown, I remember warning Barbados that we would have to put measures in place to deal with the backlash from COVID and the effect that it would have on young people and their mental psyche,” he said.
“I remember at that time also warning Barbados that when the children return to school, for the first month or so, it could not be school as usual. We could not just go straight back to teaching the academics, but the school needed to do a lot of work bringing in counsellors, working with the guidance counsellors and so on, doing sessions to help the young people to cope with what they would have been through.
“So I am not at all surprised by the statistics laid . . . by the minister. We ourselves at Supreme Counselling would have seen an increase of young people coming in or requesting our services for depression and anxiety,” Clarke added.
During his contribution to the debate on the Appropriation Bill, 2023, Minister Walcott said that some of the violence displayed by students in schools appears to be linked to mental health issues. (SB)
