The Role of Health Institutions in Mitigating the Problems of Women with Severe Mental Illness in Ambagiorgis Town; North Western Ethiopia

Abstract

Severe mental patients are defined as a mental, behavioural, or emotional problem that causes significant functional impairment and significantly limits one or more important life activities. The research study was conducted in the three selected offices: Ambagiorgis health centre, health office, and children, women, and youth issues offices in central Gondar zone, Ambagiorgis town. The study's overall goal was to look into the function of health institutions in mitigating the problems of women with severe mental illness in Ambagiorgis. This study employed descriptive research design, qualitative research. In this qualitative research, two focus group discussions, and 10 professional employees for in-depth interviews were used to gather data. According to focus group discussions, the main causes of severe mental illnesses among women were: marriage complexity, livelihood inflation/economy, disease, sexual abuse, and losing beloved families, etc. Similarly, according to individual respondents, the major causes of severe mental illness in women were poverty (40%), early marriage (30%), lack of awareness about disease itself (25%), and others (5%). The results revealed that the roles of institutions in the study areas were simple service, medical treatment with emergency and house-to-house survey in order to register. However, no powerful supports were given in the study areas to prevent mental illness before occurrence rather a little after occurrence of problems. At the same time, 80% of the respondents said that the prevalence of mental illness has increased subsequently. The Reasons for women's mental illness increments were marital problems, the economy, in-justice, and lack of government attention, with values of 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10%, respectively. The results obtained from the respondents indicated that there were no (100%) institutional studies about women's mental illness in Ambagiorgis. These conclude that women's mental illness has been given low governmental attention in the surrounding. There should be done close care approaches to the patients, recording histories, back to their own parents and follow-up to come up severe mental illness of problems in the study areas.