Aren't we all a little bit mad?

The past weeks past by in a blur, things were so busy. We got a last minute invitation to the Mpumalanga Mental Health Summit, where all mental health professionals in MP came together to talk about challenges and make recommendations for policies.
Some of the presentations were really great (most of them anyway), but the program directors should have been arrested. One stigmatizing mental health joke after the other. People were even talking about the difference between mentally unstable and mental retardation. Who uses such a word in the 21st century?
Turns out, Mpumalanga is lacking many of the mental health services it should be able to provide to its citizens following the Mental Health Care Act of 2002. There should be 1070 beds for inpatients, there should be a forensic psychiatry service to evaluate prisoners, there should be separate units for males, females, children and  adolescents. Turns out, there are 107 beds across Mpumalanga, spread over 4 hospitals, for a population of nearly 4 million people. There are 3 psychiatrists, non of whom have a specialization in working with children. There are no units for children, all kids are sent to Gauteng, where the province has 24 beds available. There is no forensic psychiatric service in the province. People wait up to more than 1 year in prison to have their mental health evaluated - without any therapy or medication. And there is no access to mental health service in the rural areas unless you are so severely disturbed that you kill someone.
We were contributing our data to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Commission and there was an outcry about our findings. Apparently no other research project has looked at the mental health of kids in the province.
Fortunately, all politicians and professionals present were agreeing on the very urgent need to improve service facilitation across the province and will be reporting this back to the national government which will hopefully support this huge task financially.