Once a month staff members carpool for 1.5 hours to an established general health clinic to provide mental health services in Hekanme. It was an honor to sit with a nurse as she saw 3 patients who agreed to be on camera. The nurse is trilingual speaking Fon, French and English. The patients conversed in Fon.

The young lady is 21 years old and told us that she has been sick for one year and is doing well. Many grow up in a culture believing that people with mental illness are bewitched and are taught by ASC to refer to themselves as sick.  The older woman was quiet and also reported doing well. The two men are father and son. The father reported that his son displayed some aggressive behavior that was of concern to him.   The son was mostly quiet but took out a notebook and wrote down his new medication instructions.

There are 25 relay stations in Benin, which are pop-up clinics to serve patients where they live.  Patients, if able,  pay the equivalent of a few US dollars for the visit which does not cover the costs. By helping to offset the cost of medications, our support helps to pay for nursing school for 3 years, medications and rehabilitative activities. Most of the paid staff are recovered patients who desire to give back to ASC.

After 5 years of construction and planning,  the addiction treatment center in Dassa, Benin has opened!  It was an honor to participate in the parade with clients, dignitaries, and guests from Togo, Ivory Coast, Canada and Spain.  A celebratory dinner was also held.

Saint Camille Associaton was first established in Ivory Coast in 1991 by Grégoire Ahongbonon, pictured speaking at the celebration. Benin was added in 2004 in Avrankou. Later, Togo in 2016. Many centers are now established in each country providing essential mental and general medical healthcare.

Nneka M. Nwosisi, MD, MPH, Medical Student, East Tennessee State University, Quillen College of Medicine, Mountain Home, Tennessee, USA

Dr. Nwosisi’s full article is published on page 15 of the Global Mental Health and Psychiatry Review, 2023

In 2022, I attended the APA conference and a talk about a campaign called ‘Treatment not Chains’ caught my attention. I listened to Mr. Grégoire Ahongbonon speak about his own journey as a patient, and how his unfortunate experiences, and cruel things he witnessed led to the start of St Camille Association. One of his most pivotal memories was seeing a man deemed as mentally ill abandoned and chained to a cross in the village. It took days for him to be unchained and weeks for him to become well again.

I grew up in Nigeria, so this type of mistreatment was not a foreign concept for me. Mental health remains a foreign concept in the places I call home, my country of birth and many communities around the world.

As a future psychiatrist with a strong interest in global health, I am grateful for the one-of- a-kind experience I had in Benin. I worked beside Dr. Nicole Ahongbonon and other health care workers at the treatment centers. I was in awe as I watched them treat patients like their own family. My goal was to get a glimpse on how to address global mental health challenges but along the way, I might have found the secret. The most exceptional and inspiring thing about this organization is their ability to preserve their patient’s dignity while they are being adequately cared for. Inhumane treatments in psychiatric settings and lack of social justice in our communities are sometimes common in Africa, and not at all uncommon in America and other parts of the world.

We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Ahongbonon has joined the staff as a full-time psychiatrist at Association Saint Camille. She is the daughter of founder, Gregoire. He and his wife, Leontine, have six children and one chose medicine! She completed medical school and residency at the university in Burkina Faso where the nurses at ASC also receive their training. She is making history as the first local, full-time psychiatrist, at ASC. Many thanks for your continued care and support to help ASC thrive and grow in so many special ways in the delivery of mental health care.

GREGOIRE RECEIVES AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION CHESTER M. PIERCE HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD AND SPEAKS TO THE CONVENTION IN NEW ORLEANS.

“We have to change the way we look at people who are fragile—because this is about humanity,” said Grégoire Ahongbonon, the founder of the Association Saint-Camille-de-Lellis (ASC), a comprehensive mental health care system in West Africa approved by the World Health Organization (WHO). Ahongbonon delivered the inaugural Chester M. Pierce Human Rights Award Lecture yesterday, titled “Person-Oriented Psychiatry: Changing the Way People With Mental Illness Are Viewed and Treated in West Africa and Around the World.”

Ahongbonon, who was born in Benin, developed depression in his 20s after experiencing a bankruptcy. He recovered and decided to dedicate his life to those in distress. In 1983, he founded ASC, where he worked with poor patients with leprosy or AIDS, prisoners, and homeless children. In 1990, upon discovering the plight of African psychiatric patients, whose human rights were blatantly violated, ASC began to house them and treat them with dignity.

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