A former Deputy Governor of Abia State and Chairman, Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital Board, Enugu, Chief Acho Nwakama, on Thursday called on government to come up with legislation to enhance mental health care delivery in Nigeria.
Nwakama, who  made the call in an interview in Umuahia said that treatment and welfare of psychiatric patients required so much that relatives of victims needed assistance to surmount the challenges.
“If you move along the streets today, you will see many of these street psychotics loitering everywhere, looking funny and all these  does not portray our society in good light. “We need a legislation at federal and state levels to protect the sanctity of man and that we can only do by tackling the problem faced by psychiatric patients,” he said.
Nwakama also appealed to education institutions to step up the training of personnel in the sector, considering that the field currently lacked manpower due to the stigma.
“When people see a psychiatric doctor, they look at him as if he is a psychiatric patient himself, not to talk of the patients; such stigma must be addressed by the legislation,” he said.
The board chairman urged government to build more rehabilitation centres for mental patients, noting that most advanced countries which Nigeria copied from, already had such centres.
Nwakama said members of the board would soon begin advocacy visits to governors of the five South-East states of Anambra, Imo, Ebonyi, Enugu and Abia on the need for states to equally come with legislation for the protection and care of psychiatric patients.