The hospitals will be opened in all three provinces of the Region - Erbil, Duhok, and Sulaimani - under the administration of both the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, who made the announcement in a joint press conference on Tuesday.
KRG Minister of Health Saman Hussein stated that while there are currently several hospitals already working on acute mental health issues in the Region, this new project will be the first to concentrate on cases of long-term mental health issues in women.
“There are [mental] illnesses that are harmful for the fabric of family and problematic for the society, which are chronic illnesses… they require the supervision and medical treatment from a specialized institution,” said Hussein, noting that some patients might need to be admitted to receive care for periods longer than a year.
Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Kwestan Mohammed stated that the health ministry will be responsible for the management of the hospitals and the treatment of patients, while under the supervision of mental health experts from the labor and social affairs ministry.
“They [women with chronic mental health issues] were on the streets, getting assaulted, or being sent by judges to shelters and elderly homes, which had a negative effect on our cases,” said Mohammed, stressing the need for such an institution.
“In a region marred by decades of conflict and crisis, people living in the KRI suffer from limited access to basic mental health and PSS [psychosocial support] services,” read a statement in January by Erbil-based NGO SEED Foundation. It added that “societal stigmatization of mental health” needs to be challenged.
Iraq has experienced a concerning rise in suicide rates, reporting 772 cases of suicide in the year 2021, with around 45 percent of those cases being women.
Another suicide factor that has been reported in Iraq is a spike in incidences of domestic violence which has hit a spike since the pandemic. Around 20 percent of the suicide deaths account for housewives, as of December last year, according to Iraq’s Ministry of Interior.
To combat suicide among young Iraqis, the health ministries of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq launched a helpline last year providing free confidential counseling in Arabic and Kurdish, with the support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and funding from Sweden.
