David Spiteri Gingell has announced the launch of the “Mental Health and Financial Capacity guidebook” to provide persons with mental health conditions assistance in acquiring financial capability and independence.

Discussing the launch on social media, Mr Spiteri Gingell, an Independent Management Consultant who is bi-polar II, reflects that he has led the implementation of the Government’s financial capacity platform – GEMMA – for the past four years.

During 2020, with the Mental Health Services and HSBC Malta Foundation, he explains, he has worked on the developing of a financial capability “for persons with mental health conditions living in the community”.

The guidebook, available for free online, identifies that “persons facing cognitive problems can find it hard to assimilate the basic financial skills”, placing persons “at a greater risk of falling into poverty, and, in the more serious cases, impede independent living”.

To help counter this, it details, GEMMA wanted to create a programme that, “once completed, could help a person achieve a solid foundation required to manage current income and expenses and plan for future possibilities”.

To do so, “the guidebook provides simple examples to facilitate learning while showing the applicability of each topic in daily living”.

In his LinkedIn post, Mr Spiteri Gingell adds that the programme was set to be launched in March 2021, “but COVID played the spoiler. Targeting launch post COVID restrictions in the coming near future.”