'Restoring the person's life': a qualitative study to inform development of care for people with severe mental disorders in rural Ethiopia
This study aims to inform development of a scalable district-level mental health care plan to meet long-term care needs
Abstract
In low-income countries, care for people with severe mental disorders (SMDs) who manage to access treatment is usually emergency-based, intermittent or narrowly biomedical. The aim of this study was to inform development of a scalable district-level mental health care plan to meet the long-term care needs of people with SMD in rural Ethiopia.
Six focus group discussions and 25 in-depth interviews were conducted with service planners, primary care providers, traditional and religious healers, mental health service users, caregivers and community representatives. Framework analysis was used, with findings mapped onto the domains of the Innovative Care for Chronic Conditions (ICCC) framework.
The study concluded that stakeholders prioritised interventions to meet basic needs for survival and endorsed a multi-faceted approach to promoting recovery from SMD, including social recovery. However, sole reliance on this over-stretched community to mobilise the necessary resources may not be feasible. An adapted form of the ICCC framework appeared highly applicable to planning an acceptable, feasible and sustainable model of care.
This research is supported by the Department for International Development’s Programme for Improving Mental Health Care (PRIME) which is led by University of Cape Town
Citation
Mall, S.; Hailemariam, M.; Selamu, M.; Fekadu, A.; Lund, C.; Patel, V.; Petersen, I.; Hanlon, C. ‘Restoring the person’s life’: a qualitative study to inform development of care for people with severe mental disorders in rural Ethiopia. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences (2017) : 1-10. [DOI: 10.1017/S2045796015001006]