COVID -19: Experts fear looming mental health illness in Nigeria

EXPERTS in mental health have called on stakeholders and governments to say there is now a looming mental health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria and called for measures to be put in place to stem the problem.

They made the call in Ibadan at a stakeholders’ engagement and dissemination programme on community resilience by Asido Foundation, in partnership with Oxlade Consulting, and supported by the Open Society of West Africa (OSIWA). It was tagged “Advancing Community Access to Equitable COVID-19 Response programme”.

The founder of the Asido Foundation, Dr Jibril Abdulmalik, said that beyond COVID-19 as an infection, the pandemic left behind a lot of negative consequences, including mental health problems, psychosocial and socioeconomic consequences, and required that many stakeholders through different activities foster community resilience.

Abdulmalik, a Consultant Psychiatrist, said the consequences were from anxiety to depression, an increasing rate of drug use and gender violence, and an increasing rate of suicide, among others.

According to him, “COVID has caused a lot of mental health problems over time and it continues to cause it. So, we need to pay attention to the mental health consequences of COVID. We need to prepare.

“COVID-19 has not gone, we are still dealing with its aftermaths; people lost their jobs they are not happy. They are battling with frustration and economic challenges and many are wallowing in the fringes of suicide thought and hopelessness.”

Dr Abdulmalik stressed the need for increased attention to mental health consequences in society and for religious leaders, governments, and the media to keep encouraging people and supporting one another to cope.

Abdulmalik said that the programme was to identify positive psychosocial community resilience stories from across Nigeria, following the call for community resilience stories and the selection of the top three stories from Calabar, Zaria, and Ibadan, which was turned into a documentary.

Commenting, the Oyo State Commissioner for Health, Dr Bode Ladipo, represented by Dr. Femi Akinyode, the state epidemiologist, said, “The pandemic made us realise that some specialists were in short supply such as social workers and mental health specialists.”

On the lessons learned from the pandemic, Dr. Ideyonbe Eseile, president of the Association of Resident Doctors, University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, said that the loss of jobs and inability to get jobs, and lack of food for families still persisted, were indications of a looming mental health problem.

Earlier, Ms Adedayo Ige, a Humanitarian and Programme Manager at Oxlade Consulting, in her remarks, said the programme was targeted at individuals and communities on how they built resilience during COVID-19.

Ige said, “We realised that in Nigeria, we do not have a lot of data, so instead of us relying on developed countries for data, this is one of the ways we can get data and prevent recurrence in the future.”