UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION (I): Bed-space corruption, terrible food, well-fed rats… Many things not right at ‘Yaba Left’

After altering his looks and taking psychiatric lessons every day for one week, investigative journalist ‘FISAYO SOYOMBO went undercover for three weeks in November, including 10 straight days onward admission, as a patient of the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos, one of the nation’s most historic mental rehabilitation centres. His report unveils the decrepit state of hospital facilities, gross shortage of critical staff despite a bloated workforce widely believed to be populated by ghost workers, low quality of service delivery, arbitrary charges on patients — all stemming from personal and institutional corruption and the hospital’s implicit stigmatizing of its very own patients.

We believed we had missed our way that sweltering afternoon of Tuesday, November 12, 2019, when we prematurely turned off Harvey Road into a building we were half sure was the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos. But we were less than five seconds in when we knew we were indeed at ‘Yaba Left’, as the hospital is colloquially, and more popularly, known.

“We’re going to the psychiatric hospital; are we in the right place, please?” I asked the gatekeeper as politely as I could. To my utter shock, he flared up. “You are at Yaba Left and you’re still asking again,” he screamed. “Oga, you wan enter or you wan comot?”

In truth, we had expected this sort of aggressive behaviour. This, after all, was a hospital for treating the mentally ill. We just didn’t expect it so soon.

IN THE BEGINNING

The history of mental rehabilitation in Nigeria is incomplete without the Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos. Since beginning life as the Yaba Lunatic Asylum in October 1907, when its primary purpose was to serve as a holding place for keeping the mentally ill out of the way of ‘normal’ people in the society, the hospital has played a leading role in the evolution of mental care to treatment and healing, not just holding, of patients.

In the opening years of its founding, and until 1950, it was purely an asylum. The first batch of 48 inmates were admitted in a rundown Nigeria Railway Building in Yaba. It was a time West Africa was generally witnessing the opening of asylums. Before this time, the mentally ill were kept in the custody of native doctors, who often contained but sometimes restrained them.

By 1951, qualified psychiatrists, nurses and pharmacists were starting to arrive. After it was managed by expatriates until the mid-1950s, the responsibility of management fell on Abraham Ordia, the first Nigerian psychiatric nurse. The next 20 years would witness the creation of an outpatient department and the commencement of occupational therapy. From the Yaba Asylum, it became the Yaba Mental Hospital. These changes were accompanied by a rising patient population that wasn’t matched by increased staffing. One hundred patients in 1925 became 200 in 1944 and 448 in 1961, yet only one doctor manned the facility. It wasn’t until 1961 that two more psychiatrists — Dr. A Boroffka, a German, and Dr. A Marinho, the first Nigerian psychiatrist to work at the hospital — were employed.

More recent decades have seen the staffing of nurses and pharmacists, a second name change to the Neuropsychiatric Hospital and the appointment of Nigeria’s first female psychiatrist as Chief Medical Director (CMD) of the hospital. These strides notwithstanding, Yaba Left was neck deep into violating is ‘guiding principles’, listed on its official website to include “patient-centred service delivery, patient and staff welfare, transparency and accountability”.

THE DELICATE JOURNEY TO YABA LEFT

After three unrelated complaints in two years about the standard of medical services on offer, I decided to experience the hospital myself as a patient rather than believe the complainants. To help devise a medically impregnable entry strategy, I enlisted the services of a US-based mental health expert. When we communicated for the first time in the first week of October, he explained I could only enter as a drug addict requiring rehabilitation after abusing marijuana and cocaine. If I faked the regular, mentally-ill patient, I would definitely be found out, he explained.

“That means I have to ingest cocaine just before I go in?” I asked. With the benefit of hindsight, I was only displaying the naivety that made me know I had to contract him in the first place.

“Not on your life!” he warned. “Close your eyes. Imagine yourself having sex and you’re just about to climax.”

Silence.

“You see that feeling, cocaine will give you five times of it. Cocaine addiction, if it happens, is almost impossible to solve. You should never touch cocaine for any reason. Never.”

https://www.icirnigeria.org/undercover-investigation-i-bed-space-corruption-terrible-food-well-fed-rats-many-things-not-right-at-yaba-left/