Nurse's influence has wide reach

Gail Stuart, dean of the College of Nursing at the Medical University of South Carolina, literally wrote the textbook on psychiatric nursing.

So it isn't hard to understand why officials who work in Liberia, a small country in West Africa, tagged her to help get a mental health training program for nurses off the ground there.

The 61-year-old professor developed a training curriculum for diagnosing and treating anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in a country that has only one licensed psychologist for a population of 3.4 million.

Liberia's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare is expected to give Stuart's curriculum final approval next month. Then the first group of nurses will be trained to treat masses of Liberians whose mental illnesses have gone undiagnosed. If the program goes as planned, those trainees eventually will teach the new skills to their fellow nurses.

Stuart became involved with the project over the summer, when she got a call from a program director at the Georgia-based Carter Center, the nonprofit group founded by former President Jimmy Carter.

Thomas Bornemann, director of mental health programs for the nonprofit, first considered tackling mental illness in Liberia more than a year before that.

During years of civil war, "sexual assaults were rampant," Bornemann said. "There were forced amputations. There was the use of child soldiers. There was drugging of child soldiers. There were tremendous atrocities that left the population very vulnerable."

Stuart, who visited Liberia in October, said years of civil unrest left the country with "pervasive and devastating" mental health problems.

"So many people have faced trauma, but they don't have the skills to screen for it and treat it," she said.

Bornemann hopes the Carter Center's program will change that by using Stuart's curriculum to train 150 nurses over the next five years.

The training program includes Liberian lexicon, which Stuart picked up during her overseas trip earlier this fall. Liberian health professionals explained, for example, that "open moles" are soft spots on the skull where some people think bad spirits enter. The ailment's symptoms are similar to those of anxiety and depression, Stuart said.

"We included it in the curriculum to get people to talk about it," she said.

The two-month courses, slated to begin this spring, would target practicing nurses. The curriculum also would be used in the country's six nursing schools.

Reach Renee Dudley at 937-5550.