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"id": 905782,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/905782/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. (Prof). Ongeri",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 124,
"legal_name": "Samson Kegeo Ongeri",
"slug": "samson-ongeri"
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"content": "Two, how do county governments assimilate and accept mental illnesses as part of those diseases that must be run by a health centre, dispensary or sub-county hospitals? They must be educated to treat mental illnesses, just like pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, and Tuberculosis (TB), or for that matter, HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS became a stigma to even pronounce that you are HIV positive. As the Minister for Heath, I remember having a difficult time trying to educate Kenyans when I brought in the Know Your HIV Status campaign. I brought in a huge band from New York City, Cool and the Gang, to attract most Kenyans to accept that HIV/AIDS pandemic is with us at 14 per cent of our population. We needed to bring it down and the only way to do so was to accept the fact that 86 per at that time, were HIV negative. Therefore, you have to change that behaviour, mood or mental make-up to accept that HIV/AIDS pandemic is with us and can be fought. Similarly, we now must change the mood of Kenyans to accept that depression is part of our way of life. We just need to control it, so that it does not go to the extreme. Kenyans must accept that they must go through certain stresses and strains. How many of us since we woke up this morning, have not gone through some level of testing or difficulty in one way or the other? Each one of us has his own issues and problems that you go through. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this Bill is trying to accept this as a norm of society. The only thing that we need to do is to put benchmarks that can define at what point this can become a disorderly illness. For many people, when you say that you are going to Mathare Mental Hospital, nobody wants to hear that stigma. They think Mathari Hospital is for lunatics, but it is not. That is a normal hospital treating people who have mood behaviours, mental disorders in one form or the other and cannot connect their thoughts or point ‘a’ and ‘b’ together. They may lose their direction. Unfortunately, fall foul of the drug peddlers and, therefore, become addictive to various forms of drugs. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I said it in this House about two weeks ago, that one of the things that we need to watch is the drug peddling in this country. The effects of drugs are driving this country into a psychotic state. One way of a psychotic state is that all manner of mafias emerge in any form. We are already seeing some signs of it. How many killings are there in society without any reasonable cause? Somebody simply just wakes up and tells his wife that she has not given him food. Is that a cause for killing your wife? No way. It is only that nobody had interest in detecting when this person was going thorough these milestones from mild depression to schizophrenic level. When they reach that level, they become violent. They become killers. This is why this Bill says: “Hold on. Can we now put benchmarks that will help us identify these individuals in good time?” once they are identified, then we can deal with the problem like any other normal illness like pneumonia or diarrhea, TB or HIV/AIDS scourge. It is a treatable condition. This is what I persuade this House to accept, that this is not a stigma problem. It is a problem of illness. In this case, it only involves the mind and the way the mind reacts to surroundings and environments. When we teach our medical students, we tell them to approach such patients, not with a distant look, but with a kind level. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}