2 Meet Untimely Death At The Hands Of Mentally Challenged Persons
As if the first was not enough for the wake up call, it took another rude awakening for the nation to sit up and begin to ask questions. Ghana is reeling from two weird incidents involving mentally challenged persons who killed two persons within a space of two months this year.
Mentally challenged persons are common sights in Ghana’s urban areas. They loiter around and for greater part of time they seem harmless or innocuous. However, flowing from their unstable and unpredictable condition, they do spring surprises. In one such fits of insanity, a commuter in the busy streets of Accra became unlucky victim. He was mowed and decapitated in a crude manner by his assailant, which eye-witnesses described as a known mental patient.
It occurred at the Kwame Nkrumah, a business nerve centre of Ghana’s capital Accra, on August 1, 2022. Reports say, the crowd that had collected to watch the horror found the unidentified man stoned to death by a mentally challenged woman. The media extensively reported the case and this generated public discussions over the next several days without official declarations. At the micro level, the case induced vigilance in people who found mentally challenged persons within their range.
The nation was jolted by another incident at Bole District in the Savannah Region of Ghana on Monday September, 5, 2022. In this one, a mentally challenged man attacked a staff of the National Ambulance Service in the Bole District. The victim might have died instantly, given that he was in vegetative state before being pronounced dead on arrival at a medical facility.
The deceased, identified as Mahama Imoro Lucky was said to be making a phone call around the school where the suspect shelters. Upon getting closer to the suspect, he was allegedly hit on the head with stone by the ‘mad person’ who fled the scene. An aspect of this particular incident stirs curiosity about knowing the state of mind of the killer who appeared to have sensed danger and bolted the crime scene.
The sheer sight of these mentally unstable persons at public squares could send butterflies in stomachs, given the objects they wield, their unkempt appearance and imposing personalities. Ghana have no shortage of institutions to grapple with the scare posed by the mentally deranged. Management of the inconvenience lay between families and institutions like Psychiatric hospitals and the Ministerial Portfolios with direct or indirect responsibilities for social welfare, public safety and even tourism.
In retrospect, stakeholders in Ghana had pressed for the mental health bill to be passed into law for ease of handling the situation.
An NGO had made the headlines in the 1990s when it found a way around the terrifying sight of mental patients to shave them.