Mental Health Implications of COVID-19 in Kenya
Abstract
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread rapidly worldwide, it is
certainly having an immense effect on the mental wellbeing on people
thereby increasing the number of people with elevated levels of stress,
depression or anxiety.1 Developing countries will undoubtedly have
serious mental health implications due to the poor or almost non-existent
mental health services.
In Kenya, mental health is still somewhat neglected mainly because only
0.05% of the Governments’ health budget allocation goes to mental
health.2 The allocated health budget largely focuses on communicable
diseases despite the impact of mental health on the Kenyan population.
Although there are no accurate data on the prevalence of mental disorders
in Kenya, various studies have shown that the prevalence of depression
generally varies from 19% in household review studies2 to 42% among
the general population visiting the health facilities.3 Similar to other
African countries, Kenya has a shortage of mental health professionals.
Mathari hospital is the country’s only mental referral facility where one
nurse handles up to 150 patients.4 In a country with only approximately
100 psychiatrists serving a population of 45 million, only a third of the
psychiatrists work in the government health facilities.5 The rest of the
psychiatrists work in the private health facilities that are generally more
expensive making them inaccessible to the majority of the population due
to the unaffordable consultation fees.
Copyright (c) 2020 Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All articles published in EJMS are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). The author/s as the copyright holder will retain the ownership of the copyrights without restrictions for their content under the CC-BY 4.0 license, and allow others to copy, use, print, share, modify, and distribute the content of the article even in commercial purpose as long as the original authors and the journal are properly cited. No permission is required from the author/s or the publishers. Appropriate attribution can be provided by simply citing the original article.
On behalf of all the authors, the corresponding author is responsible for completing and returning the agreement form to the editorial office. More information about the terms and conditions, privacy policies, and copyrights can be found on the webpage of the Creative Commons license privacy policy. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
