Above the 22-year-old Sidi’s bed in Mauritania’s only psychiatric hospital, the wall is plastered with graffiti from a country whose mental health system is as tenuous as its desert landscape.
Room 13, with the message “Stress Kills Neurons” scrawled across it, is one of just 20 beds available for psychiatric patients in the African country of 5 million people, located between the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert. is.
Sidi’s father, Mohamed Remine, blamed his son’s mental health problems on a failed attempt to immigrate to the United States.
“His friends got him into this problem. They put the idea in his head to leave the country, but the bank rejected his loan application,” Lemine said. spoke. “Then he became sad and started taking drugs.”
Three days ago, at a loss as to how to deal with Sidi’s increasingly violent psychotic episodes, Lemin finally took him to Nouakchott Specialist Medical Center, home to the country’s only psychiatric ward, where he was diagnosed with psychosis. I was hospitalized.
