Evaluating Psychiatric Rehabilitation in People Living With Severe Mental Illness in Kenya

What is it about?

People living with severe and persistent mental illness (such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) lack access to care to help them live in the community in Kenya. Nawiri is a psychiatric rehabilitation center at a Kenyan public national referral hospital. Nawiri offers psychiatric rehabilitation services including helping people set goals for their own recovery, group and individual therapy, family therapy, occupational therapy, and case management. Patients improved significantly on recovery outcomes 6 months after receiving care at Nawiri including decreased psychiatric hospitalizations, improved rates of independence in life skills, improved engagement in income generating activities, improved food security, decreased days of functional impairment from symptoms, decreased substance use, and improved engagement in outpatient mental health care.

Featured Image

Photo by Adams Korir on Unsplash

Photo by Adams Korir on Unsplash

Why is it important?

People living with severe and persistent mental illnesses deserve to set their own goals for recovery and support to live their lives independently in the community. It is important to establish programs that effectively assist with this which can also decrease expensive inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations. A more robust evaluation of program effectiveness and implementation is recommended to help explore generalizability and scalability to other resource limited settings.