Mental health matters because it affects us either directly, or indirectly and is one of the most serious challenges our society faces,” said His Excellency the Governor, Mr. Martyn Roper at the historical groundbreaking ceremony for Cayman Islands’ very first long-term residential mental health facility. “This will be a facility where care is provided to adult residents with chronic mental illnesses in a healing environment, and residents of these islands with serious and persistent mental illness will be cared for holistically, in a safe and secure environment, with the prime objective being integration back into their communities “Family and friends will be able to visit regularly instead of being separated for months or years when persons are sent to facilities overseas”

When the new facility is finished, in the middle of 2021, it will be located in the most beautiful, quiet countryside that the Cayman Islands has to offer, in the High Rocks area of East End. “Ladies and gentlemen this is sacred land that we are standing on,” said Dr. Marc Lockhart, Chairman of the Mental Health Commission, who has pushed for such a facility for many years. “This land that we look at is going to be used to create a lot of benefits and healing. Dr. Lockhart went on to explain the significance of “home” as a psychological concept, and the problem of having to remove long-term mental health patients from their home in the Cayman Islands for treatment in Jamaica: “We can then imagine what it is like for the fourteen or fifteen Caymanians that are in Jamaica, and have been away from home and are in exile, and some of them have been there for decades. This facility is going to make our nation whole again,” he said.

Premier Alden McLaughlin praised Dr. Lockheart as well as all the other people who had worked so hard to make this special day come true, while acknowledging that it was long overdue: “I always believe that heart and soul of a nation is measured in how it treats the most vulnerable among us. We have known, as a country as a people and as a government for years that the conditions under which we treated people with mental illness were even less than inadequate, and that the number of persons we have had to send overseas over the many years, is, I will say is nothing short of a national disgrace, that a country as wealthy as we are has waited this long to provide such a facility. I can’t tell you the sense of satisfaction and fulfilment I have as Premier, and a former Health Minister, to see us get to this point.”

Minister of Health Dwayne Seymour added a personal note: “It touches me deeply to stand here on this site, dedicated to so much change. My dad would have benefitted greatly from this facility,” he said, going on to explain that his father had to receive treatment in Jamaica, and was cured there, but didn’t want to come home again, “Because he felt that there wasn’t a facility here and felt he would go back to some bad habits,” Mr. Seymour explained. “But my goal is to ensure it is here for your fathers, mothers and children, friends and others who are most dear to us. So you can only imagine how near and dear this project is to me as Minister.”