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The organization and the health ministry agreed to work together on Kissy’s rehabilitation. The effort involved not only physical renewals, but also a significant shift in the perception of mental illness as any other public health issue.

The Ministry, from Nigeria, Dr. He hired Eze and another psychiatrist from Sierra Leone, who had just returned from years in the United States, on the faculty of a handful of medical students who were just beginning to take up new roles at the converted clinic.

Over four years, Partners in Health spent $2.5 million on renovations, pharmaceuticals and laboratories at Kissy, and gaining accreditation as a teaching hospital. The complex now includes a football field, an occupational therapy center where patients play board games and gather for group therapy, and a playground for the children’s clinic.

Kissy hospital project became popular Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of the organizationdied recently. In a conversation with a reporter shortly before his death, he called it “the most fantastic story” as proof of what is possible not only in Sierra Leone but in the global south.

When Mattia Jusu qualified to become a doctor and was appointed to her by the ministry of health in 2019, she was horrified to learn that she had been appointed to Kissy. “I was expecting a very short stay,” he said with a laugh. “But after a few months I started to change my mind.”

Some patients became calmer and more concerned with each passing day, and he began to see the power that mental health could offer people who had been suffering from a treatable but incurable disease for years. Two years later, he is on his way to obtaining certification as the first psychiatrist to be trained in the country.

Across the continent from Sierra Leone in Ethiopia, there is a hint of a reminder that both the sit-in program could one day produce and how long it could take. There, for the past 18 years Addis Ababa University has been running a program to train psychiatrists. The first group graduated in 2006 – seven of them, for a country of 115 million. The program has grown steadily since then, so now many of Ethiopia’s major hospitals have psychiatrists, once a professor of psychiatry with unimaginable coverage, Dr. Dawit Wondimagegn served as the university’s medical school director until recently. health Sciences. Still, that’s one psychiatrist per million people.