Manifesto for mental health: without a well-functioning public service the entire mental health care system is in crisis. The suffering person must be cared for within the community in which he lives. Therapy is not assistance, but a caring that includes the wishes of the operators and the suffering subjects.
The instrument of care is the local team which has a multidisciplinary approach, within which the different professionalisms and scientific perspectives dialogue and collaborate with each other and with the associations of users and their families.
These are the founding points of the renewal of mental health within the National Health Service proposed by Mental Health Manifesto, promoted by Angelo Barbato ofMario Negri Pharmacological Institute; Antonello D'Elia, president of Democratic psychiatry; Pierluigi Politi, professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pavia; Fabrizio Starace, president of Italian Society of Psychiatric Epidemiology; Sarantis Thanopulos, president of Italian psychoanalytic society.
The Manifesto, presented last March 28th with an online event, is supported by representatives of the civil society, scientific societies and operators' associations of the public service and the third sector.
During the presentation, it was underlined how "the pharmacological treatment of pain dissociated from psychotherapeutic work (in public services psychotherapies represent a 6% of the treatments provided) and from the complex work of socio-cultural and work integration in the community in which one lives, leaves unanswered the demand for subjectification of one's own experience and for claiming the right of citizenship (de facto denied to the subject who has lost his place in the
world). The drug is called an improper function compared to its real ability to relieve, make the pain tolerable and its use becomes abusive and abusive. To the extent that the biomedical model that pursues this perspective, regardless of the dialogue with other forms of knowledge, also claims to constitute itself as a paradigm of ways of taking care of our feelings, it becomes a danger for freedom and democracy".
"The project of rethinking mental health, to strengthen it, is not a nostalgic operation. It intends, however, to recover all the acquisitions of law 180, today largely disregarded, the scientific pluralism which for many years has allowed a humanizing approach to suffering and non-technical and a civilization of care that had set aside all practices of violent restraint, now incredibly readmitted. Shaking consciences is necessary to escape the depersonalization of therapeutic devices but, at the same time, the validity of the treatments in terms of quality of life and their ability to take charge of the dialogue between the individual and the community, allow everyone's feelings and thoughts to breathe".
"Operator training must be excellent: this means making it more rigorous and above all intervening on academic preparation. Mutual support between local teams and the communities in which they work is very important and is the best way to avoid falling into the depths of a sick society. The care of society, in the context of public service, does not pass through the guidelines of an abstract 'psychological well-being', a sort of psychic fitness. It must take charge of concretely and potentially pathogenic situations, acting in a preventive sense, and collaboration with creative practices and knowledge external to mental health is necessary. Collaboration on a clinical and research level between mental health departments, universities and scientific societies, some of which have activated consultation and therapy services aimed at social distress, is equally necessary".
Photo by Kindle Media from Pexels
