Bermudians now have the chance to improve the mental health of men and women worlds away in Bangladesh. An impoverished South Asian country of 140 million, Bangladesh has only 80 psychiatrists.

British psychiatrist Dr. Michael Radford has taken up the mantle and for the past seven years has worked with the Bangladeshi Association of Psychiatrists to train village specialists on the rudimentaries of the field.

Dr. Radford was on staff at The Mid Atlantic Wellness Institute (MAWI), then called St. Brendan's, from 1974 to 1985. He returned to do a six-month locum this year because he saw the occasion as an opportunity to make some money to help fund this programme.

"I am retired and get a pension," he said, "so any extra earnings I get I can use for the programme."

In the ambitious project Dr. Radford aims to have the almost 200,000 native healers who live and work in the villages, receive training on treating mentally ill patients. He also is seeking to improve overall awareness of mental health in the rural Bangladesh areas by training drama groups to spread the message.

By this two-pronged approach Dr. Radford feels a great improvement of the mental health of village people can be realised.

Dr. Radford's project sees local Bangladeshi psychiatrists training the native healers. The native healers are not certified physicians and in many instances are viewed as quacks by the medical fraternity. But Dr. Radford explained that he feels it's important to train these people because they are on the frontline of health care for the vast majority of people in the country (80 percent).

"It's the sort of 'meet the doctor under the tree environment'," he said. The native healers are licensed by the Bangladeshi Public Health system and do receive some basic training in Western medicine.

"But they had nothing on mental health," said Dr. Radford.

The project is conducted through the Bangladeshi Mental Health Association (UK), which hail it a success. In its July 2005 newsletter it said: "It must be noted in a country where basic needs of human beings like safe drinking water, sanitation, education etc. require massive awareness campaigns, it is really a great challenge to achieve the trust and attention in the local community as the issue of Mental Health is a totally new concept for common people."

Native healers who take the training must buy the mental health manual created for the project. Simply written with many pictures to help hold interest, the manual not only covers illnesses like neurosis, psychosis and depression but also learning disabilities and epilepsy.

This is because in the village setting the latter two often look like mental illness and are therefore treated as such. Someone having an epileptic seizure may be thought to be possessed or gone mad.

Native healers pay the equivalent of $2 for the manual. "These rural medical practitioners do get paid in the villages for the services," said Dr. Radford. "Sometimes they are paid in chickens but they do get some money. Two dollars is not difficult for them to pay," he added.

To date the project has trained one percent of the native healers ¿ that's 2,000 of 200,000. Dr. Radford personally funds the programme. He said it currently operates on about $50,000 a year. "We work with what we have. We could do so much more if we had more funding," he said.

And the work may have some real benefits for treating mentally ill patients in the West.

"For the last 30 years, one of the most tantalising and robust finding in psychiatric epidemiology is that the outcomes for the schizophrenias are better in 'developing' countries than in 'developed' ones," said Dr. Radford.

"To test whether this is true and to learn from what 'the secret of the Bangladeshi village' might be is one of my motivations in spending time there. At the same time, there are some abuses of people with mental health problems that we seek to ameliorate."

He's invited Bermudian friends and colleagues to a party/fundraiser at the Leopards Club on Saturday, February 2. "It's open to everyone. The more that learn about this project the better," he said.

"I would especially love for any Bangladeshi in Bermuda to attend. I am very interested to talk with them about setting up a support committee."

The event is from 6-9 p.m. and he urged anyone interested in attending or gaining more information on the project to contact him at michaelradford@aol.com.