By Leonardo Blair, Staff Reporter
A lone patient sits along the corridors of a wing of the Kenneth Royes Rehabilitation Centre in Spanish Town, St. Catherine, damaged by Hurricane Ivan. - Photo by Leonardo Blair
This is the second in a four-part series on the care and treatment of mentally-ill persons
IT WAS supposed to be the final gate to recovery for mentally-challenged patients but the idea of the Kenneth Royes Rehabilitation Centre has simply atrophied into a resting place for mental rejects.
The insecure compound just off the highway in the vicinity of the March Pen Road community in Spanish Town was used as a home for lepers decades ago.
But in the early 1980s it was presented as a gift to the government. It was later transformed into a halfway house for mentally-ill patients.
PLAN FOR REHABILITATION
And it was a good idea, too, says Nurse Ivy Bilton, overseer of the property for several years now.
The plan was to treat them at Bellevue, wean them at Kenneth Royes and send them back to their communities. But in the several years that she has been there, Nurse Bilton only knows of one case of successful rehabilitation.
"Here at Ken Royes, we get patients and we are supposed to get them back out in the community, but it rarely happens. Some will go out there and they will try to work doing odd jobs and so on but they always come back," she said.
"We have one person who was a patient here who went out there, found himself a room in Spanish Town and does odd jobs. In fact, he had gone to Portland to join his family but that didn't work out, so he came back here and he does enough to help
himself."
'NOT WORKING WELL'
The idea behind the Kenneth Royes Centre represents the spirit of the community-based approach to mental health care here in Jamaica but "I don't think it's working well," says Nurse Bilton. "When you send them out most of them don't do very well. Even if they are here and look like they are recovering, the moment you mention home, they start to get sick again."
According to her, "Relatives don't have the time for them and the finances are also a problem. They (government) will have to have some social welfare thing set up for them if they want to return them to their communities.
"There are some families who can afford to take care of them too, but they would prefer to have them here because they are afraid, they aren't ready to deal with them."
There are 52 persons living on the 43-acre Kenneth Royes property 19 females and 33 males.
"We normally have more persons here but since the hurricane destroyed one of the male dormitories we had to send some of them back to Bellevue," says Nurse Bilton.
PROVIDING REPAIRS
The weather-beaten buildings on the property are depressing.
With the exception of the barely kept grounds inside the quadrangle on the property, everything else looks in need of renovation.
After Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, a section of the male dormitory was destroyed and government officials came and did estimates but nothing was ever done. Hurricane Ivan came and finished what 'Gilbert' started.
So now "Those who we have here, we have to cluster them in small spaces," explained Nurse Bilton. "They were here after 'Ivan' recently and they did estimates again so, hopefully, this time something will be done," she says.
Mental health services in Jamaica are delivered through a three-pronged system consisting of the residential Bellevue Hospital, out-patient community mental health services at primary health care facilities islandwide, and residential out-patient rehabilitation units such as the Ken Royes Rehabilitation Centre.
