Aid in Action

A Nurse Jumps for Joy

Community Mental Health Nursing Skills Makes a Real Difference!

 | Friday, April 20, 2007

“This has been unbelievable, amazing, incredible!” exclaimed Ilyas Abbas during a recent Community Mental Health Nursing training.  “We now have knowledge we didn’t have before, and to address a problem that is so important.  This is just the beginning, for me this is not enough! I want to learn more!”

Ilyas has been a community health center nurse for 24 years, and has never been so pleased by the outpouring of demand for his services since he was trained in mental health nursing.  “Traditionally, people here think that mental illness is caused by ghosts,” he explained. “So they go to the dukun, a traditional healer, and spend a lot of money trying to be healed.  But it generally doesn’t work. The traditional healer will chant a secret mantra, and prescribe special foods or herbal drinks. Despite the lack of results, it made families feel like they were doing something to help.”

Ilyas went on to explain why the community mental health training was so inspirational. “I’ve learned that we can really do something to help people with a mental illness.  We can help people with medication and with group therapy and rehabilitation. We can help their families and communities with psycho-education, so that they can help in the recovery process.”

Ilyas noted that the psychosocial cadres in villages have played an important role in identifying people who need help and convincing their families to bring them in for nursing care.  “In this course, we have learned that there are not just people who are healthy, and people who are sick,” adds Ilyas.  “There are also people who are at risk for mental illness.  With the support from cadres, there is a lot we can do to prevent them from becoming worse, or even becoming ill at all.”

Reactions from nurses about the community mental health nursing training are consistently positive, with nurses happy to be addressing a serious community health issue: mental illness.  With a curricula designed by the University of Indonesia Faculty of Nursing with support from the World Health Organization, USAID has trained 18 community health center nurses from four districts. The six-month intermediate course includes a mixture of classroom learning, field application and supervised provision of mental health services.  Thus far, the nurses have identified 823 people with a mental illness, and provided services to 724 of those clients. Nurse Ilyas was commenting on the training program as is completes it second of three phases, at a point when his field experience is growing.

“I am so excited about this new knowledge that I would like to try to study to become a trainer in mental health nursing,” concludes Ilyas. “By training more nurses in the way I have learned to provide services, I feel I would really be able to help a lot of people in the community.”