SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Caribbean peo­ple tend to face many nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, from flood­ing to storms to most re­cent­ly vol­canic erup­tions.

Add that to a pan­dem­ic which has been on­go­ing for over a year and shows no signs of re­ced­ing and you can end up with pop­u­la­tions who are men­tal­ly ex­haust­ed and have dif­fi­cul­ty cop­ing.

In light of this, the leader of one Caribbean con­glom­er­ate is call­ing on busi­ness­es to pro­vide men­tal health ser­vices to their em­ploy­ees.

Speak­ing dur­ing the Bo­cas Lit Fest “The Big Idea: The Way For­ward for the Caribbean” vir­tu­al pan­el, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of ANSA McAL An­tho­ny N. Sab­ga said more needs to be done to ad­dress men­tal health is­sues.

Sab­ga was on a pan­el with Pro­fes­sor John Agard and Econ­o­mist Dr Justin Ram mod­er­at­ed Na­talee Legore.

Sab­ga said the ANSA McAL group pro­vides free men­tal health ser­vices to its thou­sands of em­ploy­ees.

Asked how he felt this could trans­late in­to wider so­ci­ety by pan­el host Legore, Sab­ga said, “I think a cam­paign of des­tig­ma­ti­sa­tion is a good ap­proach, this is not an area of my ex­per­tise or one I can com­ment on com­plete­ly but cre­at­ing space and en­sur­ing that peo­ple are ac­com­mo­dat­ed, you check in with those un­der and with­in your care and do­ing so pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly is im­por­tant.”

Sab­ga said a pos­si­ble so­lu­tion to ad­dress­ing the men­tal health is­sues is for the Gov­ern­ment and oth­er or­gan­i­sa­tions to im­ple­ment sim­i­lar poli­cies.

He re­called the toll-free num­bers that were avail­able for use for sui­cide pre­ven­tion when he was grow­ing up.

“Are there ways that the tele­coms can pro­vide this? And then there have call cen­tres that are trained in this re­gard... we could pro­vide that sup­port among our­selves but some­times this thing needs a learned mind that can ex­tract what can be pro­fi­cient­ly ex­tract­ed and be able to di­rect and treat ac­cord­ing­ly,” Sab­ga said.

Pro­fes­sor John Agard said some coun­tries have solved this is­sue by cre­at­ing poli­cies and laws and fol­low­ing up to en­sure they are im­ple­ment­ed.

Agard said bad lead­er­ship is a crit­i­cal is­sue in the Caribbean.

“My main point is, re­al­ly and tru­ly we have to go to ac­tion and en­force poli­cies and en­force laws and not leave it as to you can do it if you want, be­cause that is re­al­ly what is not work­ing,” Agard said.

Econ­o­mist Dr Justin Ram said gov­ern­ments could con­sid­er pub­lic/pri­vate part­ner­ships to bet­ter tack­le men­tal health is­sues in the work­place.