A FAR cry from the upper-class conditions and surroundings at Tara is the Zola Clinic in Soweto. Established ten years ago, the Zola clinic looks from the outside like a small shopping centre.
A three-metre high brick-wall with razor wire running around the top surrounds the building. A few faded graffiti, mainly old political slogans, are on the walls.
The functions of this primary health-care clinic include caring for up to 800 psychiatric patients a month, mainly schizophrenics and people suffering from depression. Struggling for finance, the clinic was recently able to carry out improvements – such as providing doors for the psychiatric ward’s offices.
As part of the rehabilitation programme, patients take turns every day to clean the ward. Outside, young men work at making a small wooden bench for the ward.
Ernest (45) makes frames for paintings and photographs. “It helps me forget about my problems,” he says, while showing how to spell his name. He is a schizophrenic but due to the treatment he has received at the clinic he is able to help himself, thereby earning “a few extra rand”.
His friend Cedric (28) – also a schizophrenic – is painting “Mother Mary”.
“I like it here, it’s quiet and I can paint,” he says. “My life has been very difficult but I feel happier when I’m painting.”
Debbi Gould, a psychologist at the Zola clinic, believes the patients’ families should become more involved with care.
“Some chronic patients should be treated by families and really sick ones should go to halfway houses during the day, where they can come closer to the community.”
Gould says that institutions such as Tara can be “bad because patients are alienated from the community”.
She believes that the patients and staff at the clinic use “space better” than at Tara. “There’s not a rigid format here like they have at other institutions with better resources,” she says.
Gould and the ward’s head nurse, Dumi Masondo, stress the need for community involvement in the care of mental patients.
“We must make the community more aware that psychiatric patients must be treated with care and understanding,” says Ma-sondo.
She says they are paid very little by the government and have to earn their own money to offer proper facilities. “We need halfway houses and remedial schools because we have kids who can’t go to normal schools,” says Masondo.
What’s the pattern for the future? Tara or Zola? Asked this, health department representative Mervyn Freeman said the government was focusing more on primary health-care clinics.
At the same time, hospitals like Tara were needed and would remain, he said.