Cebu City Council to push for implementation of a five-year-old mental health ordinance

Cebu City Councilor Mary Ann de los Santos delivers her privilege speech before the Cebu City Council during its regular session on Wednesday, July 20, 2022./ photo grabbed from Mary Ann de los Santos FB page

CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Cebu City Council will ask the City’s Executive Department to include in its priority programs on health the “committed” implementation of a five-year-old health ordinance creating a barangay-based Behavioral Health Unit among the city’s 80 barangays.

This after the City Council carried the motion of Cebu City Councilor Mary Ann de los Santos, urging the serious implementation of Ordinance No. 2479, entitled “Ordinance creating the Barangay Behavioral Health Unit within the Barangay Health Center, and providing funds therefore,” which was passed during the time of the 14th Cebu City Council.

In a privilege speech during the City Council’s regular session on Wednesday, July 20, 2022, De los Santos emphasized the importance of the said resolution as it aims to provide a “holistic approach” to health by addressing not only the medical but also the mental health of each resident.

She said it is unfortunate that even with the good intentions of the ordinance, only one of the City’s 80 barangays was compliant with the ordinance even after it was passed five years ago.

She was referring to Barangay Lahug, which already established a behavioral health unit while the rest of Cebu City’s barangays, she said, “lag behind.”

Lahug was then commended by the Council through a corollary motion by Councilor Jocelyn Pesquera.

De los Santos said that the behavioral unit in Barangay Lahug was activated in response to the ordinance using the barangay’s resources. She said the unit is functioning in “education, preventing, interfering, identifying, treating, and monitoring” on all mental health issues already.

To justify her motion, De los Santos began her privilege speech by extensively quoting a column written by columnist Anna Cristina Tuazon entitled “Public mental health: A wishlist.” The said column was published at the Inquirer.net last June 23, 2022.

READ: Public mental health: A wish list

“While public interest in mental health has increased over the last few years, investment in mental health programs and services remains low. This parallels the Philippine situation where there was a marked increase in mental health awareness but where government spending on mental health remained incredibly low, with the Department of Health (DOH) allotting only 0.3 percent of its total budget toward mental health, according to their 2022 budget briefer,” said De los Santos, quoting a portion of Tuazon’s column.

The Councilor said she agrees with Tuazon on her insight that while medication, management, hospitalization, and psychotherapy counseling services, needs focus, these should also not be the only component of a mental health program, as there are also issues of sanitation, hygiene, and healthy lifestyles to prevent health problems.

De los Santos said that having had experience in helping establish the grassroots based barangay behavioral health unit in Lahug, she agrees with Tuazon in saying that “community-based care is best suited to address a wide spectrum of mental health concerns, from complicated problems of living to long-term management of psychiatric conditions, such as depression and anxiety.”

Aside from being a columnist at the said publication, Tuazon is also a Psychology graduate and an associate professor at the University of the Philippines, who teaches undergraduate courses under the Clinical Psychology program for more than five years now.

/bmjo

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