The Mental Health Authority, together with the Databank Foundation, is actively promoting the mental health of employees within their professional settings.
This initiative is part of the authority’s commitment to public education on the significance of fostering a mentally supportive environment, particularly highlighted during the ‘Purple Month of May.’
At a seminar in Accra titled “Strategies for Mental Health and Wellness Success in Workplaces,” Dr. Kwadwo Marfo Obeng, the Chief Psychiatrist at the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, pointed out prevalent mental health issues in the workplace, including anxiety, stress, and occasionally depression.
Dr. Obeng also brought attention to the role of substance misuse, such as alcohol, in exacerbating mental health problems and emphasized the importance of mental health education for both supervisors and their teams.
“At least 15% of the working population is dealing with a mental health issue at any given point in time. This is an international statistic but it will be around that in Ghana. You are looking at the person’s work environment, the nature of the person’s work whether they are doing work that is extremely demanding or overly competitive or whether the person has channels of communication so that if they have a challenge they can deal with it.
“And training your managers to be able to identify people who have issues and intervene quickly. And develop plans to intervene when they are having a mental problem,” Dr, Obeng emphasised.
Clinical Psychologist at the University of Ghana Medical School, Seth Mawusi Asafo, also advocated for mental health to be a much talked about subject, in our working environment.
“We know that sometimes our stifling work environment can cause people to develop a lot of stress and predispose them to having physical and mental health conditions.
“It’s important for us to talk about mental health within institutions. That active awareness is what brings people to a place where they want to even start doing something about it,” he stated.