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World Mental Health Day

Full Text: Nelson Chamisa on World Mental Health Day commemoration

Advocate Nelson Chamisa

Today it is the World Mental Health Day, a very important occasion where we stop and reflect on how we would have spent the previous year looking after the most import part of the human body, the mind.

On the 10th of October every year, the world commemorates and acknowledges the importance of mental health across the world in metropolitan and rural communities.

The focus on this year’s World Mental Health Day is on suicide, because it has become a global public health crisis that is preventable, and yet it has become a mental health menace which has taken many of our people to the grave prematurely.

Hopewell Chin’ono: World Mental Health Day is a reminder of our broken economic and political system

By Hopewell Chin’ono

I met Winnie Ndoro through a friend in 2017 when I was looking for people to participate in a mental health documentary film, which I went on to make and called it State of Mind.

State of Mind is launching today in Harare at Ster Kinekor cinemas in Harare at Sam Levy Village and today is the World Health Mental Day.

Winnie is a bipolar patient but she has managed to have the condition under control through the usage of medical drugs.

She is a single mother with a beautiful daughter who at times makes sure that her mother has taken her medication.

Winnie is a trained sonographer and is very good at her job such that her former boss and the owner of Baines Imaging, Dr Naik, told me that he was happy to keep her job at Baines Imaging each time she had a relapse.

Today Winnie who is now a friend called to tell me that her local pharmacy won’t take her medical aid card anymore and that it won’t take the Bond Note currency either as a form of payment.