Mental health crisis demands home-grown solutions – experts

Caribbean mental health experts must reject imported frameworks and build region-specific solutions to tackle soaring youth trauma and anxiety, professionals declared at the launch of a major psychology conference here. Psychologists and advocates warned that without urgent action, a generation risks being lost to untreated mental health crises that transcend national borders.

These demands were issued by former Barbados Society of Psychology (BSP) president Ronald Pope and youth advocate Sean Clarke on Thursday during the pre-launch of the 6th Caribbean Regional Conference of Psychology (CRCP 2025).

Pope urged regional professionals to abandon dependency on foreign models and instead build their own frameworks for psychological care, education, and development.

“It signals our collective recognition that the time has come for caring voices in psychology to take centre stage-not as echoes of imported frameworks but as architects of our contextual grounding models of mental health, education and development,” Pope declared.

He described the June 9-13 conference as “groundbreaking” for Barbados and the wider region, praising BSP members for their persistence and vision. Participants were urged to embrace CRCP 2025 “not just as attendees but as core creators of a future in which Caribbean psychology is not only represented but respected, researched and resourced”, he said.

The conference, themed Building Mental Health Resilience: Empowering Our Communities, will gather psychologists, educators, and community leaders to discuss strategies for mental wellness.

President of Supreme Counselling for Personal Development Sean Clarke described an alarming rise in trauma, anxiety, and depression among Caribbean youth, whom he said are suffering in silence across borders.

“Too many of our children across the Caribbean are carrying invisible wounds. These are not isolated to one island. They ripple across our region from Barbados to Dominica, from Antigua to Grenada,” Clarke lamented.

He framed mental health as essential to survival: “A child’s mind burdened with trauma is as dangerous as a body starved of food. Just as we will never allow a child to starve, we must not allow their minds to suffer in silence. We must act-and we must act now.”

Clarke issued three demands ahead of CRCP 2025: mandatory mental health programmes in all schools, increased investment in counsellors, and community-based safe spaces for youth.

He proposed Barbados’ Supreme Development and Awareness Programme as a regional model, calling for “embedded, sustained, life-saving programmes” beyond one-off workshops.

The advocate condemned punishment-based education systems, stating: “Our prisons across the Caribbean – from those in Barbados to Golden Grove in Trinidad – are filled with young men and women who were failed long before they committed a crime. They were failed when we told them to ‘man up’ instead of asking ‘what happened to you?’”

Clarke urged normalising mental health discussions in daily Caribbean life: “Let us speak about mental health in our churches, in our rum shops, and on our radio stations. If we can talk cricket, carnival and calypso, we can talk about mental health.”

Both speakers called for mobilising knowledge, resources, and empathy to protect the region’s future. CRCP 2025 organisers aim to establish Caribbean psychology as an internationally respected discipline through locally rooted research and practice. (LG)