Ghana: Faith Healers Defy Ban on Chaining.
M2 PRESSWIRE-November 27, 2019-: Ghana: Faith Healers Defy Ban on Chaining
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ACCRA, Ghana -- Faith-based and traditional healing centers in Ghana continue to hold people with real or perceived mental health conditions -- psychosocial disabilities -- in chains in inhumane conditions despite a 2017 ban on such treatment, Human Rights Watch said today.
"People with psychosocial disabilities are still chained like animals," said Shantha Rau Barriga, disability rights director at Human Rights Watch. "If the government wants its ban on chaining to be more than empty words, it needs to ensure that these chains come off and develop local mental health services that respect the rights of people with mental health conditions."
From November 4 to 8, 2019, Human Rights Watch interviewed 25 people, including people with psychosocial disabilities, mental health professionals, staff at prayer camps and traditional healing centers, mental health advocates, religious leaders, and two senior government officials.
Of the six prayer camps or traditional healing centers across Ghana's Greater Accra, Eastern, and Central regions that Human Rights Watch visited, dozens of people were chained in two facilities. At both centers, men detained there called out to the Human Rights Watch researcher, begging to be released. In one traditional healing center, Human Rights Watch found 16 men in a dark, stifling room, all of them with short chains, no longer than half a meter, around their ankles. They called out: "We are suffering here. They are abusing our human rights. Please help us. Please help us."
"The chaining of people with mental health conditions needs to stop -- it needs to stop," Ghana's deputy health minister, Tina Mensah, told Human Rights Watch. Similarly, in a meeting with Human Rights Watch, the gender, children and social protection minister, Cynthia Morrison, said: "I give you my commitment right now, and I'm sure we'll bring an end to it."
At another prayer camp, people with real or perceived mental health conditions continue to be confined in cages that they are rarely allowed to leave, based on regular visits since 2011. They are forced to urinate or defecate in small buckets placed outside their cells. Most cages are so narrow that the men cannot even stretch out their arms. In two other facilities, people with mental health conditions are not chained, but the head of each camp explained that they are...
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