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{
    "id": 1157440,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1157440/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 188,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Wetangula",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 210,
        "legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
        "slug": "moses-wetangula"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir. Sen. Kasanga has been on the frontline of pursuing and supporting matters mental health. She brought a Bill to this House, which she promoted on behalf of the stakeholders in the sector. It was unanimously debated and passed. I am happy that she has continued to champion this interest of a forgotten substantial population of our country. If you want to explain the neglect visited on mental patients in this country or people with mental challenges, you just have to look at Mathari Mental Referral Hospital. This only mental facility in the country is totally derelict, completely forgotten and nobody bothers about it. It is defined in the law as a national referral hospital, but it does not even look like a dispensary. People who are taken to that institution is sometimes akin to being taken to prison. In the past, I have assisted admission of constituents and persons known to me to that hospital. The stories I get after their admission are always appalling. For this House to champion the interest of persons with mental challenges to come to national debate and be promoted into a legal framework, including an Act of Parliament that will regulate and manage not only mental health practitioners but a detailed outlay of how mental patients need to be identified, treated, cared for and rehabilitated, is something absolutely laudable. Our society has been growing and so have been challenges to peoples’ mental capability or disability so to speak. You have all manner of situations transformed from internal turmoil of several individuals into full-blown mental incapacity and sometimes being manifested in violent behaviour. When you have a legal framework that can help, you have a society that has to be caring to its disadvantaged people, especially those who are incapable of managing and controlling their mental faculties. Some mental patients can be violent. As the Bill states, we need a humane way in dealing with them. Sometimes you go to homesteads, instead of a person suffering from mental problems with a propensity of violence being taken to hospitals for attention and treatment, they are tied with ropes, locked up in houses and fed through holes. Sometimes food is passed through a window through which nobody can get out for them to eat and remain confined. That way, it degenerates the mental health of the person even further. Equally important, is the increasing road rage we have in this country. We have seen a very minor motor accident and of the motorists steps out with a gun and shoots the other. That is a mental patient. It can just be that you love your car to the extent that a"
}