Sascha Wil­son

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said the beat­ing of 15-year-old Al­liyah Alexan­der and sui­cides demon­strates that more ef­forts must be made to reach peo­ple with men­tal chal­lenges.

Deyals­ingh was speak­ing at the min­istry’s launch of its Men­tal Health Find­careTT Stake­hold­er En­gage­ment event at the San Fer­nan­do Teach­ing Hos­pi­tal on Mon­day.

He re­called that when he took up of­fice in 2015 he had said that men­tal health is the black sheep of the Min­istry of Health be­cause ab­solute­ly no at­ten­tion was be­ing paid to it.

While the min­istry has de­cen­tral­ized men­tal health, he said they will nev­er know how many lives they would have saved be­cause the da­ta does not ex­ist.

“The news com­ing out post- COVID as far as men­tal health of our coun­try is con­cerned and the world is one that need at­ten­tion paid to it, es­pe­cial­ly un­for­tu­nate sui­cides and re­cent­ly the very un­for­tu­nate in­ci­dent of that 15-year-old child who was beat­en. Those ef­forts un­der­score the need to reach out more and more to peo­ple,” he said.

Not­ing sev­er­al fa­mous sports per­son­al­i­ties have spo­ken out about their men­tal chal­lenges, he said men­tal health, pos­si­bly like COVID, is no re­specter of sta­tus, in­come. “It af­fects any­one and if these peo­ple can be af­fect­ed, we would ask what about the or­di­nary hu­man be­ing,” the min­is­ter added. While thank­ing those sports per­son­al­i­ties for break­ing their si­lence, he said there are still some peo­ple who are ashamed to come for­ward.

The min­is­ter added, “One of the things that we have to over­come in Trinidad and To­ba­go is stig­ma and how do we en­cour­age peo­ple.”

While sui­cide pre­ven­tion cri­sis sup­port and oth­er men­tal health re­sources are avail­able, Deyals­ingh said they have to get peo­ple to un­der­stand that they need help and di­rect them to where they could get help.

Quot­ing 2021 sta­tis­tics of peo­ple who have reached out for help, he said Red Cross re­ceived 770, T&T As­so­ci­a­tion of Psy­chol­o­gists record­ed 1700 calls and the Find­careTT site had 50,000 page vis­its in 15 months.

“And we need more. We need word to go out that this re­source is there. We need fam­i­ly friends co work­ers to recog­nise signs when some­one is en­gag­ing in these types of be­hav­iours.”

South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA) CEO Dr Bri­an Ar­mour ex­plained that Find­Care TT is a di­rec­to­ry for the na­tion­al emer­gency and cri­sis men­tal health ser­vices in re­sponse to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Ar­mour added, how­ev­er, that in ear­ly Feb­ru­ary 2020, be­fore the first COVID-19 case in, the SWRHA ac­ti­vat­ed its emer­gency in­ci­dent com­mand lead­er­ship team to man­age all as­pects of the cri­sis, in­clud­ing men­tal health care.

He said its toll free Cus­tomer Care Cen­tre 87-SWRHA, pro­vid­ed tele-men­tal health coun­selling to any­one who need­ed emo­tion­al or psy­cho­log­i­cal sup­port.

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, he said the ser­vice was well used by peo­ple across T&T and they al­so had some in­ter­na­tion­al calls.

For the SWRHA staff, he said five tele­phone lines were avail­able at their Men­tal Health De­part­ment and Au­thor­i­ty al­so re­ac­ti­vat­ed our Em­ploy­ee As­sis­tance Pro­gramme.

Maria O’Brien, di­rec­tor of Mind­wise Project, the de­vel­op­er of the Find­careTT web­site, said the most vis­it­ed pages on the web­site were Ad­dic­tion Sup­port, Gen­der Base Vi­o­lence and Sui­cide Pre­ven­tion.

She added that the ser­vice could be ac­cessed from any elec­tron­ic de­vice.

Point­ing to some of the warn­ing signs of sui­cide, she said these in­clud­ed dras­tic mood changes, say­ing good­bye to fam­i­ly and friends and giv­ing away pos­ses­sion, feel­ing hope­less, talk­ing about want­i­ng to die, in­crease drug use and reck­less be­hav­iour, iso­la­tion from friends and fam­i­ly, ir­ri­tabil­i­ty and sleep­ing too much or too lit­tle.

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