Yesterday, on the side of the street, walking, I saw a naked man - not one stitch of clothing. My friend's driveby diagnosis was 'schizophrenia', which prompted a conversation about the treatment of mental illness and other disabilities in Burkina Faso.

Downs Syndrome - in four years she'd never seen a Downs Syndrome person in the country - and had been told that there is a special school for them, which she wasn't sure how to understand, given the poverty of the country (175th out of 181 countries ranked).

One traditional treatment she has seen was when she saw about a dozen people chained to trees in a courtyard - each person had their own tree, and couldn't reach any other person. She gathered that our term for what they were being treated for would be 'psychotic episodes'. The traditional healer claimed that his treatment 'cured' them in somewhere between three days to three weeks. A psychiatrist she knows said that 'yes, that was about the average range in length of time for an untreated psychotic episode'.

I've seen very few people with physical disabilities - some people limping, but that could also just be a temporary injury. I was told that there was a polio outbreak several decades ago, resulting in a significant number of people without full use of their legs. They are treated well - equipped with hand-cranked wheelchairs, trained in a trade to support themselves, and generally highly regarded. And there are services for blind and deaf people.

We know one family with a severely multiple handicapped child, and treatments there have ranged from modern medical care, through faith healings and traditional medicine - managing to keep the child alive for more than five years now.

Services for learning disabilities are almost non-existent (other than perhaps in the most expensive schools), so, other than for those lucky enough to get personalized attention in small classes, any variety of learning disabilities would lead to illiteracy.

The remarkable thing about the naked man is that he drew no attention whatsoever (other than a couple of rubber-necking white people in a car). We saw him again on our way home an hour later - he also had reversed directions - wasn't carrying anything. Just walking.