Call for crisis teams as mentally ill man allegedly beheads mom

WESTERN BUREAU:

The haphazard decentralisation of mental-health care has been blamed for the incidence of deadly violence committed by mentally ill people in Jamaica, one of the island’s leading consultant psychiatrists has said.

Professor Wendel Abel, head of community health and psychiatry at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, has lamented that access to mental-health care is severely disorganised.

“What decentralisation has done, it has made the system a little bit more unwieldy,” Abel said in a Gleaner interview on Tuesday.

“What you have at the end result is four different regions and four different systems that are not necessarily uniform, and that is a major issue. So you don’t necessarily have a uniform allocation of resources.”

His comments come against the backdrop of the grisly murder of 53-year-old Michelle Gayle-Brown, who was repeatedly chopped, allegedly by her mentally challenged son, in Retirement, St James.

The headless body was discovered inside her four-apartment concrete dwelling on Monday afternoon. However, investigators believe that Gayle-Brown was murdered between 8 p.m. on Sunday and 4:30 a.m. Monday.

Abel has described as inadequate Jamaica’s capacity to manage the tsunami of mental-health cases sweeping the island.

He said that the western health region, where Gayle-Brown’s 29-year-old son lives, has only one consultant psychiatrist – the lowest number of all the regions.

Abel disclosed that the North East and Southern health regions both have three consultant psychiatrists.

The expert has recommended that the Government strengthen community health service by identifying high-risk individuals and tracking them in communities to ensure compliance with their treatment regimen.

The consultant psychiatrist has also called for the establishment of a crisis team for every parish and promotion of a simple, three-digit number families can call to make complaints.

“The State has to provide more support to families, and that’s the bottom line,” Abel said.

In the meantime, Abel also appealed to the public not to cast blame on caregivers when mentally ill persons act out violently.

“Yes, sometimes families may be late in accessing care, but this is understandable if the care is not easily available, because you may have a family member who needs to be taken into hospital but you can’t take them. You need support from a crisis service,” he said.

Nalda Barnaby, the neighbour of Gayle-Brown, believes her close friend was killed because she refused to him give money to purchase marijuana.

Her 29-year-old son, the prime suspect, was taken into police custody. Two machetes, which may have been the murder weapons, were taken into evidence by the police.

“A protect him mother a protect the boy and yet him still chop off her head,” Barnaby told The Gleaner in an interview on Monday.

“... The reason mi believe him kill him mother, him want money, and the lady refrained from giving him money because him a go buy weed, and she don’t want him to go back to the stage where him a come from,” shared Barnaby, a 59-year-old housekeeper who admitted to being traumatised over the heinous death.

Gayle-Brown, who is employed as a caregiver, did not turn up for work on Monday morning.

Her employer reportedly got curious and drove to her home, which was securely locked.

Her boss then alerted the police who climbed through a bedroom window to gain access to the house.

Gayle-Brown’s headless body was discovered wrapped in a sheet on the floor of her bedroom.

It is alleged that her body had more than 50 chop wounds. Both her arms were partially severed. Her fingers were also severed, and some of her teeth were scattered across the room.

Her head was found wrapped in a towel inside the kitchen.

hopeton.bucknor@gleanerjm.com