Spotlight Interview with Dr. Moses Ziah II

“Two words – ‘Truth’ and ‘Competence’ always build Confidence.”- Dr. Ziah

Location: Monrovia, Liberia

Bio: Dr. Moses Ziah, II is a Liberian psychiatrist who currently works in Liberia as one of three psychiatrists in the country. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from the Mother Patern College of Health Sciences in 2010, and a Doctor of Medicine degree from the A.M. Dogliotti College of Medicine in 2017. In 2022, Dr. Ziah became inducted as Member by Examination of the Liberia College of Physicians and Surgeons (MLCPS) upon successfully completing his residency training as the first home-grown psychiatrist and first graduate of the faculty of psychiatry of the Liberia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is an educator who has imparted hundreds of students with over several years of experience serving as classroom teacher both at secondary school and university levels. He is currently a lecturer at the Mother Patern College of Health Sciences, his alma mater. As a specialist clinician, he also provides lectures and mentorship to medical students and residents. Dr. Ziah is an active volunteer who worked as frontliner during both Ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks in 2014 and 2020 respectively at which time he worked with a number of local and international organizations in Liberia. He is the founder and host of ‘Health Talk with Dr. Ziah’, a radio and television platform which provides basic health education to the general public. He is an inherent leader, and currently serves as the Secretary General of the Liberia Medical and Dental Association (LMDA), the largest professional body of medical doctors and dentists in Liberia. As a psychiatrist, Dr. Ziah aspires to pursue a clinical fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry considering the increasing burden of substance abuse especially among the youthful population in Liberia and beyond. He also has the ambition to engage into clinical research especially in the area of mental health and substance abuse., and to become a professor of psychiatry.

Briefly, can you please introduce yourself.

Thank you very much for having me. My name is Dr. Moses Ziah II. I am a Liberian, born in Liberia, and have proudly lived all my life in Liberia. I am married and have two lovely daughters. At the moment, I’ve just completed my training and graduated from the Liberia College of Physicians and Surgeons (LCPS) Psychiatry Residency Program. I currently work at the E.S. Grant Mental Health Hospital as one of the three psychiatrists in the country.

When did you know you wanted to become a psychiatrist?

The journey into becoming a psychiatrist wasn’t one that I could have predicted, but I think everything happened for a purpose. I am really proud of where I am now. I had initially wanted to pursue my training in Obstetrics and Gynecology. The process is once you graduate medical school, usually you are required to do a one-year mandatory rural posting upon completing internship before going forward. Doctors who have completed rural posting are more likely to enter the program because they completed their obligations. So, in the midst of my posting, I studied and took the exam to enter OB/Gyn and was one of the top performers. Shortly after I joined the OB/Gyn residency program, there was a turnover in the training program during which time the management decided to accept not more than four residents in each faculty. At this time, in a batch of seven residents, our class had to be reduced to the four best suited residents. We had a period of discussion with the administration trying to convince them to implement this policy the following year, rather than our current year. During this period of negotiation, I really started reflecting and considering psychiatry as my next option. I knew that in Liberia, one of our country’s major issues deals with mental health, and on top of that, at the time we only had one trained Liberian psychiatrist in the country, Dr. Benjamin Harris. I used that time of negotiation to think correctly as to what my options are. The policy was implemented and our class was reduced to four. Even after the policy change, I was still accepted in the class of four to resume my OB/Gyn training, but I voluntarily turned in my admission and chose psychiatry. I knew psychiatry would allow me the opportunity to help the growing number of people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders. This is really where I thought I could make the biggest impact from the beginning. I think that all of this happened to get me to where I am today. Even when I had the choice, it was psychiatry in the end for me.

Why is psychiatry important to you?

Mental illnesses and substance use disorders are very common in Liberia. On a daily basis, you see mentally ill people roaming the streets and the number keeps increasing. There was not much being done for these people, and I saw that as a problem. Among young people, a lot of them start using substances very early. I saw psychiatry as an opportunity to provide solutions to these existing problems. People who are mentally ill need all the help they can get. They need people to advocate for them. They need people to help them to return to full functioning. They need voices to speak on their behalf and to improve their quality of life. Such voices include mine. It is even more important to me now that I am a psychiatrist. I now know about the problems, lack of support, and ineffective policies in mental health. I believe we, psychiatrists, have to give our all, including getting involved in a lot of research to produce quality work and publicly shared evidence that emphasizes why we need more mental health support in Liberia. I think it's important to recognize that before I graduated, we only had two psychiatrists in the entire country. The rest of mental health services were and still are provided by other clinicians who receive some basic crash course mental health training. And you can imagine that whatever help they’re providing is very helpful compared to none, but still is not up to the standard needed. That's why it is really important that other people join the cause so we can improve psychiatric services in the country.

Can you share your experiences from being a psychiatry resident in the LCPS Psychiatry Residency Program?

Being a psychiatry resident at Grant Hospital has been a great experience overall. Although it may not be a field that everybody wants to run to, the experience over the three years was really exciting for me. The environment was made conducive by our local faculty, Drs. Harris and Ojediran. They are very kind and humble people. They treat us with respect and they make learning fun. It really encouraged us and has been an environment of love and unity. Beyond our local faculty, our foreign faculty were really interested and passionate about what we wanted to learn and improve on. Another positive to the program is that we had a great patient experience. E.S. Grant Mental Health Hospital is the only mental health hospital in Liberia, so patients come from around the country. We were exposed to many patients with a variety of diagnoses, all of which gave us exposure and built our competence over time. We had clinical hands-on guidance from Dr. Ojediran, where he would actually be in the clinic with us and guide us from the start. That really gave us the confidence to use the knowledge gained and apply it in the clinical setting. Dr. Ojediran even takes the time to go through every case one by one. The residents all together had great team spirit. We worked well together as a team with positive energy. We really leaned on each other. Lastly, I really enjoyed our external rotation in Nigeria, which was a three-month posting. Our program is designed as an integrated curriculum with information extracted from the U.S., West Africa, and South Africa.  The exposure to different setting is a true positive of the program and the opportunity to travel meant a lot to us residents.

What is something you are proud of accomplishing?

I would say becoming a psychiatrist. It is something that I am really proud of achieving. And moreover, becoming the first psychiatry resident to graduate from this program. It has given me a lot of obligations and opportunities which have allowed me to grow professionally. Being a psychiatrist has helped me become a better person and set me up to improve mental health services in the country. I am honored to be the first product of this very important program and the youngest psychiatrist in Liberia at the moment.

What advice would you like to share with future residents?

With special gratitude, I take this opportunity to recognize the efforts of my colleagues. We work in a team and we all work together to achieve our goals. They have all been very loving, very understanding, and very kind. I encourage them to keep focused on the goal, and keep working even harder. They need to make psychiatry a part of their daily routine in order to navigate the difficulty learning psychiatry. All of us are destined for greatness, I believe. We are going to achieve more when we work together as a team.

What’s next for you in your career and life?

I have a very open mind and I believe there are a lot of things I can achieve. I’m looking forward to a lot of things, one of which is being able to complete a clinical fellowship in addiction psychiatry. I will be looking forward to building my research capacity. I believe there is a lot of opportunity here in Liberia for research. Beyond that, I look forward to engaging in academia. I am passionate about teaching so I want to move along that direction to ultimately becoming a professor.  With time, I am looking forward to exploring all those opportunities. I want to give as much as I can.

Closing Thoughts

I am really grateful to God for the bountiful blessings upon my life as an individual to have the opportunity to achieve the things that I have achieved. With profound gratitude, I want to recognize the efforts of Professor Benjamin Harris who has been a trailblazer in mental health in Liberia. I am thankful for all his efforts and for all that he's done to improve psychiatry in Liberia. But beyond that, he built up others and helped create this program in order to produce more psychiatrists in the country. I also want to recognize Dr. David Henderson who we of course cannot leave out when talking about psychiatry in Liberia. Everything that we have now as faculty of psychiatry is a result of his interest in Liberia, his passion for mental health, and dedication to building long-lasting relationships. Additionally, I want to extend gratitude to all of our faculty members starting with Dr. Babawale Ojediran. He is so humble and such a gift to us here in the program. To Dr. Micaela Owusu, thank you for making it happen. Thank you to Dr. Malveeka Sharma, Dr. Temitope Ogundare, Dr. Allen Brown, Dr. Aminata Cisse, Dr. Aderonke Pederson, Dr. Kimberly Hook, Dr. Michelle Durham, Dr. Mary Yang, Senait Ghebrehiwet, and our professors and trainers in Nigeria who have been helpful in making this training program successful, and for continuing to ensure the success of future graduates. Thanks also to the training institutions especially the E.S. Grant Mental Health Hospital, John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Liberia, and University College Hospital, University of Ibadan and Aro Neuropsychiatric Hospital both in Nigeria. I hope in the future we have even more psychiatrists than we can even imagine. I also want to thank my family including my wife, children, and parents. I had to be in and out of the country, in and out of home during these times, and I really felt the support from my family. Finally, thank you to the government of Liberia who provided the platform for all of this to be possible, and for granting me this education while supporting me financially. It really shows that our government cares about healthcare and they want to make things better for the future of medicine. I really could not be where I am today without all these people and support systems.

Thanks to you, Joanne Won for conducting this interview.

 By Joanne Won, November 2022