Help the vulnerable
MELVILLE - Ward 87 Councilor Amanda Forsythe and Tara hospital organised a fruitful Mental Health training for SAPS.
Tara Hospital together with Ward 87 Councilor Amanda Forsythe organised a Mental Health Care Training Day for the South African Police Service (SAPS) on 1 October.
The training was aimed at educating SAPS on how to help the mentally ill, especially those living on the streets of Johannesburg.
Forsythe stated that given her recent experiences with Helen Joseph, SAPS needed to be educated. “It appears that we now need to work on the quality of service and security at public hospitals too, before we can really help this incredibly vulnerable population,” she said.
She added, “This is now becoming a human rights issue, as the rights to proper care and treatment, as enshrined in the Mental Health Care Act are being trampled on by those who are supposed to be the first to protect them.”
SAPS also brought to attention that they are sometimes afraid of doing their jobs because they fear trending on social networks.
Head of Psychology at Tara Hospital, Jonathan Percale, said in his presentation that SAPS is supposed to understand the Act and should help to take the mentally ill to hospital. However, SAPS appeared to be unimpressed with the Act which was first published in 2004. “The person who wrote the Act did not consider what goes on at the grass root,” said Linden Police Captain Alex Vermaak.
He added, “This workshop gave us some great insights into the challenges. It was a fruitful event…going forward, I am going to install the confidence of my members; I think they become overwhelmed when they reach something like this because they are not medical people.”
Sergent Iris Phoko also shared that she was clueless on how to handle mentally ill people. “When I am faced with such challenges, I don’t know how to respond…and the community expects us to protect them. The training helped me a lot,” she said.
