THE new Minister for Health is reported to have committed the Government to converting Laloki Psychiatric Hospital into a general medical facility for the Central province.
If this is indeed Mr Zibe’s plan for dealing with the Central province’s lack of a hospital, then we urge him to re-think his proposal.
The Laloki facility, run-down, ill-equipped, targeted by vandals and thieves and largely ignored by everyone else, remains this country’s sole psychiatric hospital.
The lack of Papua New Guinean mental health services is a major disgrace and a public scandal.
The National carries frequent reports of judges and magistrates who are regularly confronted with defendants whose alleged crimes clearly indicate the need for psychiatric assessment.
Many cases need such analysis so that the courts can determine the culpability of those charged.
Such an approach to court hearings has been standard practice for decades overseas.
The provision of a psychiatric input as part of the process of defining the personality and motivation of those who appear before the bench is an integral part of justice systems around the world.
The tiny number of practising psychiatrists within the Health Department is a sad comment on the medical priorities that have been set over the years.
And it underlines the readiness of successive ministers of health who ignored an area of medicine most were only too happy to see buried in the too-hard basket.
Now it appears that ministerial apathy has been overtaken by a positive move against the maintenance, let along the future development of mental health facilities.
Our youths are increasingly addicted to drugs and to illicit homebrew.
The National Narcotics Board has existed in name only for a decade; its record of attacking the burgeoning drug problem in PNG is abysmal.
Police personnel have had no more success in controlling the manufacture and sale of sly grog.
Youths decapitating children, young husbands torturing their wives to death, the now notorious case of the baby allegedly plucked from its mother’s womb – many of these and dozens of others that do not make the headlines are the result of drugs and homebrew.
The state of mind of the perpetrators of these terrible crimes is and should always be the concern of judges and magistrates.
No sensible doctor attempts to cure a wound without discerning what caused the wound in the first place.
In the same way, jailing people without attempting to diagnose the causes of the state of mind in which they committed what are often grisly crimes is to fail the justice and health systems and to fail society at large.
For psychiatry to take its rightful place in this developing country, there must be a referral hospital dedicated solely to mental health.
To change the operations of Laloki, opened some four decades ago by the Australian territorial administration and warmly welcomed by the community at the time, would be to throw PNG mental health services back into the dark ages.
And given that sorcery and associated rituals are never far below the surface in PNG and that The National continues to report an upswing in associated examples of torture and murder, the case for retaining Laloki could scarcely be stronger.
Far from converting this struggling but essential facility into a general hospital for the Central province, Laloki should be rebuilt and re-equipped.
The services provided should include a much expanded group of professional psychiatrists, obtained from overseas if necessary.
Laloki should be transformed into a teaching hospital so we can train our own psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses and other mental health professionals. Mental health problems in PNG, whether generated by drugs, alcohol abuse or any other of a myriad of reasons, are far more widespread than is generally acknowledged.
Like the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which also forms a responsibility of the Minister for Health, the statistics relating to mental health are woefully unconvincing and palpably inaccurate.
It is time that the tiny handful of highly skilled PNG psychiatrists and their dedicated colleagues from overseas were given the support that has never been forthcoming from the governments of this country.
Laloki must not become the final nail in the mental health services coffin.