For years a mother in Tebet, South Jakarta, locked her son, who has mental a disorder, in a room every time she left the house for work – until one day a health worker stopped by.
Dr. Fadhlina, Tebet community health center’s head of family and teenager consultation clinic, or mental health clinic, said she visited their house and convinced the mother to take her son for treatment.
“He has now recovered.
“His mother said to me, ‘If I had known, I would have taken him here a long time ago’,” Fadhlina said Wednesday on the sidelines of a mental health seminar.
To mark World Mental Health Day on Oct. 10, the Health Ministry held a seminar on mental health services, one of Indonesia’s primary health services.
According to Health Ministry data in 2007, approximately 20 percent of Jakarta’s total population have severe mental health disorders.
Health Ministry mental health division director Aminullah said community health centers in cities and regencies were crucial to diagnose mental health disorders and provide better services for patients.
“Mental health hospitals’ outreach potential is limited because they are only available at the provincial level,” Aminullah said.
“To compensate, mental health services have been integrated with primary health services, and they have been made available in community health centers so assistance is more readily available.
“This enables faster diagnosis and treatment for mental health disorders.”
Get it together: A community health center (Puskesmas) is located near the residential area of Petojo. Many do not realize that such facilities also offer psychological counseling services. (JP/Nurhayati)
Aminullah said the government had provided mental-health training to community health centers
to increase their capacity to treat disorders.
He said most community health centers in big cities had mental health units, adding all community health centers in Jakarta had units.
Fadhlina said the Tebet community health center had a mental health unit since 1996. The unit
was renamed the Family and
Teenage Consultation Unit, to help lessen the stigma against mental health patients.
Fadhlina said the stigma associated with mental disorders was an obstacle in tackling mental health problems. She said superstition, poverty and misinformation also hindered the ability for people to receive treatment.
She said mental health services from centers cost Rp 5,000 per visit. The center employ patients, who have been fully rehabilitated, to assist people with mental health disorders.
Thirty-nine-year-old Ariandy Arief Noor is one of the center’s patients.
Ariandy, who successfully manages his schizophrenia with medication, said people with mental health disorders were more willing to open up to him.
“I can understand what they are going through because I’ve experienced it myself,” he said.
He added he also reminded patients to continue their medication because some patients stopped when they saw results. They thought they were cured.
Ariandy said some people also became tired of taking medication.
He said the mental health unit staff in the center could be more attentive than doctors at mental health hospitals.
“The doctor at the hospital only asked me if I heard voices, jotted down notes, and gave me medication.
“There was not much communication.”
“However, at the center they are attentive and even assist patients’ families,” he said.
“Sometimes patients who don’t have money ask the staff for permission to pay later.
“Sometimes staff give money to patients who don’t have money to travel home. They’re amazing,”
he said.
The recent mental health seminar said it was harder to be treated for mental disorders in Jakarta due to its poor infrastructure, difficult traffic conditions and regular floods, among other reasons.
A mental disorder expert who attended the seminar, Dr. Ratna Mardiati, director of the Soeharto Heerdjan Mental Institution in Grogol, West Jakarta, said Jakarta’s poor infrastructure had given Jakarta residents “high stress levels”.
She said this contributed to the number of patients with mental disorders in the city.
She said at least a quarter of the capital’s nine million inhabitants were highly stressed, while 14 percent experienced mental disorders because they did not remedy their stress levels, according to last year’s figures.
There were 1.4 million people treated for stress in community health centers across the city in 2007, Dr. Ratna added, and she expected this number would increase each year.
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