Special Hearings — Mental Health Workshop — UNKNOWN

PARTICIPANT: I think the, as I say the one area where we really found it difficult to reach consensus was; should the Mental Health Act be something entirely separate and removed from the medical profession? Or should we have one comprehensive Health Act which covers everything? And I think some discussion around that would be useful.

PARTICIPANT: Thank you but you have noted that this whole issue of the location of mental health is likely to be an important point fr discussion, Okay thank you.

MR GREY: Okay thanks. I would have deferred to my group as well but as it stands at the moment I feel that what we spoke about. We spent, we initially started discussing training which came under the role of mental health workers in transforming society. I then spoke quite beautifully about SISA's initiative to, based on the fact that there's currently a drastic fallout from induction for graduates, from induction to graduation. And that people are actually falling out of courses and from about 500 inducted students you end up with about 8 qualified psychologists. SISA's proposal and it might not be that new in terms of the national proposals but is to suggest a diploma which qualifies someone in specific areas. In other words you get an Aids Counsellor or a - I don't know, a Bereavement Counsellor, a Trauma Counsellor. And really the proposal that came from that was that we should endorse that broadening and demystifying of mental health services which make it more accountable and also more accessible to the people who need it. And that's because I mean it's cost effective, it's got a better service delivery and then also to include the experiences that we've learned from the consequences from gross human rights violations into primary health care teaching and the curricula itself. So that was our first training recommendation.
 Then we spoke at length about this issue of knowledge acquisition and ownership. And the group spoke for quite a long time around the issue of incorporating the TRC's body of knowledge into a culture of story telling and keeping a self examination and revisiting memories. The sharing of collecting material, how could we promote that? How could the Truth Commission make a recommendation that promotes that short of culture of looking back and examining the material that's come up from the Truth Commission. There was a recommendation to stress the importance of developing a case study and role playing aspect of teaching not just, moving away from a lecture paradigm. Also to incorporate the TRC's body of knowledge into the history curriculum. I mean the discussion was around really not losing all the rich information that the Truth Commission has gathered; all the tapes, all the testimonies, all the different stories from different role players.
 Okay the other issue around the knowledge question was promoting our current body of history as a national treasure and really with the group for the Truth Commission should put some thought towards how that would be done. Or how we would do that. There was a suggestion of living monuments but not one national monument but monuments that are linked locally. That people can go to and link into other monuments in other regions and discover. So basically the story telling doesn't stop with the Commission. That it carries on and that people as part of well-being or mental health actually have on-going access to that kind of information.
 There was a recommendation that stories of torture continue to be recorded and that research continues, needs to happen, is to continue following the Truth Commission's work. Specifically on torture and it's consequences. And that government and private funders should prioritise this area of research in terms of not only examining torture but survival issues of resilience, long term effects of torture, impacts on communities of torture. So there should be a strong recommendation to prioritise that as a research need. Then which also feeds into the fact that on top of that what we thought research, it's another question how accessible that research and accessible the results of that research would be. 
 In terms of policy - what's the issue on the board? Okay, contribution to policy development. The recommendation was that the Truth Commission should examine ways of presenting new knowledge so the communities can benefit. And move away from the external research paradigm. We discussed that at length. We didn't come up with particularly specific recommendations around that but generally I think if we can phrase it at a later date how research for whom and by whom.  In a nutshell we wanted to also in terms of policy the buzz word was we need to democratise the lobbying process.  Governments and state services should be able to prove public participation in policy development. There was a suggestion to set up toll free numbers, this would increase accountability of government policy making and the accessibility that people have to it. It was quite an interesting idea to set up a toll free because often government departments say: "We've asked the community to make comment on this." But people actually can't, they don't have the way withal to feedback. So if those departments set up toll free numbers people could ring in. And postal, free postal.
 We also hit on whistle blowing protection. I think Wendy's almost shows exactly what we said. Also the role of the public protector doesn't seem to, I think that needs to be reinforced. Because that is a kind of whistle blowing, how can I say, vessel that people have available to them. But I don't think people are aware of that. So a recommendation is that it should somehow reinforce the role of public protector.
 And then finally we spoke about endorsing on-going research into the corrupt and racist psychological research that have happened and exposure of the negative effects of this and where the funding came from. And to prevent the disappearance of research documents that seems to be on-going. In terms of the Truth Commission I think it was recommendation that we simply endorse the on-going investigations into these things. 
 And then contribution to progressive psychology we had, our recommendation concerning that was government and academic institutions must support community mental health initiatives at community level by providing funding, resources and including inputs into policy development. So I think that was the issue around the CBO's and the NGO's and their relationship to government and that really if the Truth Commission can sort of nudge those government to keep supporting those. Because in a lot of these areas that we've been discussing it seems that in terms of community we haven't discussed communities very much. Those organisations that are maintaining a community focus with regard to well-being or mental health. So we can only, I don't know how to pitch that recommendation. But that's what we, basically that's what we spoke to. 
 And in terms of what's the issue?  Enhancing representivity, we thought that representivity was such a broad concept that we couldn't really pin it down, so we didn't even try to. Although acknowledging what the different, what it was actually trying to aim at, which was I think through the training recommendations. It's about really getting the whole spate of South Africans into, this word "well-being" is coming into the conversation too much. But inter-mental health issues and how we do that. But I  don't think it's unique to the TRC's mandate, representivity and that kind of affirmative angle. That's what we discussed.

PARTICIPANT: Are there any other points which other members of group 2 would like to add, which maybe Tulani might have missed?

MR GREY: Sorry just to clarify the point that we made about document (