Pangan: Focus on mental health

MEDICAL practioner and columnist Kay Chua Rivera called attention on our mental health, especially workers in public and private offices.

In the whirl of things, we rarely talk of mental health or the circumstances surrounding it, the reasons for its upkeep and the pitfalls of medical practice.

Considered by many as a sensitive topic, few writers attempt to write a topic or two about mental health.

It is good that Dr. Rivera, because of her professional orientation and experience, forged ahead her mini dissertation.

There should be an agency entirely devoted to giving adequate, mental care and counselling services, taking into serious account the numbing effects of the pandemic.

The points cited by Dr. Rivera in her column Hints and Symbols are well-taken: the investments in mental health services must be increased and more mental health care professionals be engaged to look after more Filipinos suffering or about to suffer mental illness.

She calls on other colleagues in the medical profession to improve ways to deliver the best possible care through online consultations, therapy sessions, seminars and wellness classes.

She concludes her column, thus: By all means, let us boost support for mental health services which are sorely needed and which have been too long neglected and stigmatized.

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Like all other responsibilities, the government must oblige by taking care of the mental health of its residents, free from stress, anxiety and fear, especially in this time of the global pandemic.

The ever-reliable Senator Sonny Angara, in his column Better Days in the Manila Bulletin, wrote: Mental health has historically been a difficult subject to talk about in Philippine society. True, mental patients are treated with inferior esteem, even stigmatized and considered outcasts of our society.

Senator Angara rued the fact that the global pandemic and the ensuing quarantines and lockdowns had a negative effect on the mental health of Filipinos.

He volunteers that the National Center for Mental Health and partners, public and private, such as the Philippine Mental Health Association and universities like UST and Ateneo de Manila offer health care services. Their lifelines somehow give the mental patients and near-sufferers a glimmer of hope.

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