NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania: The wall was tagged with graffiti above 22-year-old Sidi’s bed in the lone psychiatric hospital in Mauritania, a country whose mental health system is as sparse as its desert landscapes. “Stress kills your neurons,” said the message scrawled in room 13, one of just 20 beds available for psychiatric patients in the African country of five million people, which sits between the Atlantic and the Sahara.

Sidi’s father, Mohamed Lemine, traced his son’s mental health troubles to a frustrated attempt to emigrate to the United States. “His friends got him into these problems. They put the idea in his head of leaving the country, but the bank turned down his loan application,” Lemine said.

“After that, he became sad and started taking drugs.” At a loss on how to handle Sidi’s increasingly violent psychotic episodes, Lemine finally brought him three days previously to the Nouakchott Centre for Specialised Medicine, home to the country’s only psychiatric ward, where he was admitted with a diagnosis of psychosis.

Lemine, a retired army officer with a neatly trimmed white beard, had installed a mat in his son’s room to keep watch over him. Like most patients, Sidi was expected to remain in the center only a few days. Beds and staff are too scarce for longer stays. “We need to increase the number of beds. Lots of patients travel long distances to come here, and there’s no other psychiatric care infrastructure,” said one of the center’s doctors, Mohamed Lemine Abeidi. The center’s 20 rooms line a wide, turquoise-and-cream-colored corridor that is filled with constant bustle: women bringing their children meals; a man visiting his brother; a worried uncle trying to calm his paranoiac nephew. Non-violent patients are also allowed to stroll the hall, accompanied by relatives.

They greet the head nurse, joke with the security chief, and talk to anyone who will listen about their concerns of the day, from politics and erectile problems to Satanic visions.

“Almost all the patients are accompanied by their families,” said Abeidi, calling it a “cultural specificity” of Mauritania. Outside the door to the ward, dozens of people were gathered, making tea as they waited. Like all Mauritania’s mental health professionals, Abeidi, a psychiatrist, studied abroad, given the lack of training programs in the country. — AFP