South Africa: Focus On Children, Urges President of SA Society of Psychiatrists

"There's a mental health crisis in South Africa and yet, today, there are fewer than 40 registered child psychiatrists in the country," Dr Anusha Lachman tells Spotlight.

Lachman is also head of the Clinical Unit Child Psychiatry at Tygerberg Hospital. The unit is the Western Cape's only tertiary hospital based assessment unit for adolescents aged from 13 to 18 years with complex psychiatric presentations and severe mental illness. The young people they help often face not only mental health issues, but the full range of psychosocial challenges - from poverty to exposure to violence, substance abuse, and HIV.

"It's a complex relationship between environmental stressors and vulnerabilities to mental illnesses." She explains that environments that are high risk - with violence, poverty, untreated mental illness in caregivers, food insecurity and economic burdens - predispose children to mental illness expressed commonly in mood disorders, anxiety and trauma responses.

She adds:"One child psychiatrist is trained only every two years. And only from a university that can train them. There are only four universities that can do that here - Stellenbosch, Wits, UCT and Pretoria. It depends after two years if the student passes the exam or not so that is why there are so few."

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