Young African Psychiatrist Knew 'Something Had to Be Done'

Cameroon is a nation of about 19 million people nestled on the coast of West Africa, just southeast of Nigeria. The country includes 200 ethnic groups in eight French-speaking provinces and two Anglophone provinces, legacies of the colonial period that ended in 1960. The country is officially bilingual. Kamga Olen's mother tongue is Féfé, spoken around his hometown of Bafang. His second language is French, and he is working hard to improve his English proficiency. Becoming f luent in English means more than just adding another line to his resumé. He hopes it also will open the wider world of research published in English to him and his colleagues.

Kamga Olen's father was a nurse and his mother a schoolteacher and later a headmistress. His siblings include another physician, a pharmacist, an engineer, and a professional soccer player.

He completed seven years of medical studies in 2000 at the University of Yaoundé I, in Cameroon's capital. Kamga Olen chose psychiatry as his specialty in his sixth year in medical school. He spent four months in the English-speaking town of Atchatougie, near the Nigerian border.

“The hospital took in 100 patients a day, and the medical officer in charge gave me a lot of responsibility,” he said. “I lived in the hospital and did everything—general medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, general surgery.”

Among his patients were several with psychosis or cocaine addiction.

“I found it difficult to help them,” he said. “The psychiatric training in medical school was limited, and I felt frustrated that I knew so little when I encountered these patients.”

When agitated patients arrived in the hospital, the other doctors didn't know what to do with them and simply wrote prescriptions for diazepam. The only real recourse was sending them to psychiatric facilities in Yaounde or Douala, both 500 kilometers away.

“So I knew something had to be done,” he said. Doing something would take time, however.

After graduating, he spent a year as an internist and emergency physician in the university's teaching hospital before taking a post as district medical officer in the town of Djoum.

In 2002 he requested a grant from the Cameroonian government to train in Senegal because there was no place in Cameroon to train psychiatrists. After completing that residency, he received a second grant to study for a Ph.D. in neurophysiology, concentrating in epilepsy. A former middle-distance runner, Kamga Olen retains an interest in the psychological side of sports and is president of the Cameroon Wrestling Association's medical commission.

Kamga Olen is already working to swell the miniscule ranks of psychiatrists in his home country.

“Alone I can do nothing, so I have been encouraging young medical students to join me,” he said. “Three recent graduates have already come to Dakar for their psychiatry residencies. I am also trying to convince the Ministry of Health to organize conferences to attract students to the field of psychiatry.”

(American Psychiatric Publishing Inc. has contributed eight recent books to serve as the core of a library for these young psychiatrists in training.)

He also completed a master's degree in mental health law while in Senegal.

His first priority when he returns home at the end of the year will be to take a post at the Ministry of Health and validate the country's draft mental health law by comparing it with similar laws in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

“Cameroon needs a mental health law to protect the rights of mental health patients and define what the state needs to do for them,” he said. ▪