Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 1093725,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1093725/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 216,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 210,
        "legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
        "slug": "moses-wetangula"
    },
    "content": "I also agree with those who have spoken ahead of me that most of the people who commit suicide sometimes have mental problems that are not diagnosed. We have put little energy on dealing with our mental problems. The other day, I saw my good old friend Dr. Frank Njenga, the distinguished psychiatric, talking about the need to upscale our tension to mental health. If you go to Mathari National Teaching and Referral Hospital, which is the only national referral hospital on mental illness, it is like a prison. It run like a prison where you dump the most unwanted criminals and leave them there. It is never looked after, it does not get a good budget and it has never been upgraded an. It looks like a place where you only take people you do not need in the society. Many of our mental patients can be any one of us. We know people in public life who speak boisterously about anything and everything, but have records in Mathari National Teaching and Referral Hospital. We do need to mention names, but anybody who cares to know, knows that some of these noisy characters have mental difficulties. Therefore, we need to upscale the treatment of our mental patients. We need guidance and counselling. We need to train more psychiatrics and counsellors in our universities. If you look around the medical profession, this country does not have more than a 100 qualified psychiatrics. If you ask yourselves, who are the psychiatrics in Kenya, even people who have been around for long like Sen. Orengo and I, will probably come up with Dr. Frank Njenga and Dr. Ndeti. We do not know the rest. We need to have as many acclaimed psychiatrics as we have physicians, neurosurgeons and others so that they take care of our mental health. Madam Temporary Speaker, the Government should take serious and deliberate positive steps to upscale the treatment of mental illness to the level where every county should have, at least, at their county referral hospital and a mental wing to deal with cases of this nature. We do not have to ferry people from Mandera, Narok to Mathari and when they land there, their situation becomes worse. This is because it is worse than being thrown in the cell at Kamukunji. I do not know whether Sen. Orengo remembers what our colleagues, for example, Sen. Muthama went through in Pangani Police Station. They told us harrowing stories. In this day and age in Kenya, you are taken to a police station, locked up and you are given a bucket to ease yourself in case you need to have a call of nature. This is not the Kenya we should be talking about in this century. That kind of act alone that a grown up is locked up in a cell and is given a bucket to have a long or short call yet you are with many others in the cell, automatically turns you into a mental patient. You will come out and have serious problems if you are not counselled. We have the case we have seen from Kiambu today of a wealthy person who wakes up, turns a gun on his wife and takes his life. What is the problem?"
}