Another report issued by consultancy firm KPMG to the Cayman Islands Government was released last week. This one is a study on the need for a mental health facility here.

It must come as no surprise, during a week of a major surprise, that KPMG has recommended building a long-term residential mental health facility in the Cayman Islands as the best way forward to treat local patients.

Mental patients at the moment are locked up in Northward prison because there is no adequate facility to place them in.

With criminal records being served on them they cannot travel outside the country to obtain proper treatment, especially in the USA.

However, even when this facility gets built it doesn’t automatically mean mental patients won’t be locked up.

In an article that appeared only last year in the Washington Post, reporter Ana Swanson said, “The U.S. has 10 times more mentally ill in its prisons than in psychiatric hospitals”.

“In New York, a man with schizophrenia spent 13 years of a 15-year prison sentence in solitary confinement. In a Minnesota county jail, a man with schizophrenia stabbed out both of his eyes with a pencil in his cell. A study of 132 suicide attempts in a county jail in Washington found that 77 percent of them had a “chronic psychiatric problem,” compared with 15 percent among the rest of the jail population.

“In a country where the mentally ill are often incarcerated instead of treated, these kinds of incidents are far too common. According to a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, which includes the anecdotes above, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 inmates with severe mental illness in 2012—on par with the population of Anchorage, Alaska, or Trenton, New Jersey” – See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/30/a-shocking-number-of-mentally-ill-americans-end-up-in-prisons-instead-of-psychiatric-hospitals/

Therefore, safeguards MUST be in place even before the facility is in operation.

The recommended facility is based on a design that incorporates a central building and a series of nine small cottages, each of which would accommodate six patients. A main building and seven of the cottages would be developed in the initial phase of construction, and the rest built in later years as demand dictates.

It all sounds very nice and the government will provide the funds needed out of its own resources.

This announcement was made before the Brexit. And the doom and gloom over the shock decision may put a dent in all of the budgets government have just had passed by the Legislative Assembly.

I doubt whether this facility is as high up on the list as the long-term residential mental health facility steering group committee members who worked alongside the KPMG consultants think.

Never-the- less I commend government for getting this far. No previous government has.

There may not be “a scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life” but mental health is a high priority and it is a duty of government to provide and isolate the sufferers of it in a proper facility with medical care. It is unfortunately a colourless skein of life . The World health Organization states, “One in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Around 450 million people currently suffer from such conditions, placing mental disorders among the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide.”

They go on to say:

“Treatments are available, but nearly two-thirds of people with a known mental disorder never seek help from a health professional. Stigma, discrimination and neglect prevent care and treatment from reaching people with mental disorders, says the World Health Organization (WHO). Where there is neglect, there is little or no understanding. Where there is no understanding, there is neglect”

Therefore, providing the facility is only part of the problem.

Government must study all of them.