African Woman and Child Feature Service

A female rehabilitation centre at Mathari hospital may be closed down or given to the male wing after female drug abusers failed to turn-up in large numbers to utilize it.

The 15-bed centre has been operating below capacity, sometimes with no or only two female clients in a given month. The wing was build after complaints that the hospital lacked a female centre that could be used to rehabilitate women who abused alcohol or other drugs.

Since its inception, the hospital has continued to find it difficult to get female clients. Meanwhile, its male rehab section is full to capacity, with others on the queue waiting for space.

“The current situation is worrying to us because we know there are females who are in substance abuse and need help. Yet they are not coming to be helped the way men are doing,” says Dr Nelly Kitazi, the hospital’s Superintendant.

What is worrying are the findings of studies which show women drug abusers suffer greater social and health problems than their male counterparts, strongly indicating they need more help to reverse the problem and lead normal lives.

Dr Kitazi says while abusers of hard drugs the world over are predominantly men than women, she feels there is something at the individual and family level that is holding back women from seeking these services at the facility.

“Either the women themselves or their families are not seeing this is a problem that needs intervention of experts at a rehabilitation centre.”

Prof David Ndetei, a lecturer at University of Nairobi and Director of African Mental Health Foundation AMHF’s Director agrees.

“Families, especially fathers, tend to be protective of their female or daughters in the house than men even when they are abusing drugs. Hence, they will readily coerce a male drug abuser to go to a rehabilitation centre that they will do to the female with same problem.”

According to Beckman L. in his study, “Treatment Needs of Women with Alcohol Problems”, women alcoholics were more likely to delay treatment initiation and encounter resistance to their treatment entry from family and friends, and were less likely to receive referrals from physicians
and the legal system. Families were found to hold to their women, who they considered vulnerable and needing much attention at home as an outpatient than being held within an institution.

Admission to rehabilitation requires someone to accept they have a problem and need help to sort it out. This means checking-in a rehabilitation centre on voluntary basis ready to be helped. If it is heavy drinking, taking cocaine or smoking, those who want quit usually agree to go to the rehabilitation centre to be taught how to do it. Many of those who take this action are compelled by the realization that their behavior is drifting them to the grave or it has resulted in a shattered career.

This may then leave one to hypothesize that women or their families are not willing to accept that they have a drug problem, which needs help.

The other way one may enter the rehab centre is through family members consent or through a court order. In the first case, the person is admitted at the rehab centre with families consent or coercion. In some cases, this happens when the person engages in violent acts, crimes, other petty vices that are a nuisance to everyone. But experience has shown that those who walk into rehab centres on voluntary basis register fast milestones in recovery than those who are forced.

Psychiatrists think women being less violent are rarely taken to rehabilitation centres through this forced or coercion route as their families and communities thinks they can help them recover fast from the abuse.

The other problem is the Kenyan society rarely associates drug abuse with females, and hence when a woman falls in this trap, they do not take it with much seriousness as they do when it is a man.