Handicap et troubles mentaux de l’enfant chez les ruraux au Sénégal

Background

Like the other African developing countries, in Senegal, disparities in health services between towns and the rest of the country are very important in, particularly, the main town. Only some populations have opportunities to get enough quality of care health services. A lot of children and adolescents endure chronic diseases or handicap without correct assistance. Only one modern unit gives the children and their family adequate mental health cares.

Objectives

The authors try to determine the sociodemographic characteristics of the children coming from rural areas and consulting in child-psychiatry unit of Fann Hospital (Ker Xaleyi). They examine the origins of their mental handicap and make also the analysis of the main elements. At the end, some tracks of solutions are proposed.

Methods

Retrospectives data are used by consulting files of the children who have consulted at the years from 2000 to 2006 in the child-psychiatry unit “Kër Xaleyi”. Starting from the whole, those concerning the areas outside the main town (Dakar) are particularly analyzed. Data are treated by the freeware Epi Info 6 which is a series of programs for use by public health professionals, general database and statistics applications. In this work, the frequencies are mostly calculated concerning gender, age, repartition by region, kinds of disorders and diseases related to handicap.

Results

Only one quarter of the patients comes from rural areas. Some regions are poorly represented like Tambacounda and Kolda. Repartition about gender is not so different whatever the region or the trouble considered. Intellectual deficiency is more frequent as handicap. Concerning the sources of the mental handicap presented by many children, a majority is related to organic affections.

Analyze/Discussion

The differences seem to be linked to geographic availability (more the region is far from main town, less the population is represented in the unit), traditional convictions (persons are more in contact with mystic and irrational considerations in rural areas unlike the metropolitan citizen who have more information and education) and the poverty level is a characteristic of our rural areas (health care services and the means of transport are more developed in the city). Malaria and purulent meningitis cause sequels, which are aggravated by deficiency of taking care and inefficiency of prevention.

Conclusion

Despite real difficulties in rural areas, a reduction of the gap in health services between the main town and the other cities can be realized by a better prevention policy, a better exchange of ideas between actors and new consideration of sociocultural realities.