The Mental Health Bill is scheduled to be discussed in the Senate on July 7. Various organizations such as the Paraguayan Society of Psychology and the Solidarity Movement for Mental Health have been working for years on an initiative to “de-institutionalise” the psychiatric care system in the country, which is currently concentrated in the Psychiatric Hospital.
However, two weeks before the start of this debate, the Senate Health Commission accepted a preliminary draft prepared to the “measure of the Psychiatric Hospital”. The document was prepared by legislators who “do not know everything about the subject and assume the role of errand boys” such as Senator Enrique Riera, said psychiatrist Charles Rodas, one of the main promoters of the bill to “de-institutionalize” psychiatric care in the Paraguay.
“If they approve it, they will be complicit in the abuse committed in that institution, as well as the authorities of the Ministry of Health, who, blinded by medical omnipotence, continue to believe, as at the end of the 19th century, that serious mental sufferers are all incurable, violent and incapable ”, reads the professional’s statement.
In this sense, Rodas regretted that parliamentarians want to maintain a system that does not facilitate the reintegration of psychiatric patients and does not guarantee humanized care for them.
“Vote, Senators, be consistent, vote according to immediacy, ignorance or interest. Vote for what the Ministry of Health tells you and keep the asylum in its goal of confinement, solitary confinement, inactivity and social decomposition. You vote for the maintenance of professional privileges and for the inhuman condition both in its technical treatment, and in the absence of rehabilitation of hospitalized patients, ”he sentenced in the statement.
Read More: They seek to eliminate confinement in psychiatric care.
SITUATION OF THE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
The current model of care in the Psychiatric Hospital is not designed to “cure”, but for custody or confinement, the psychiatrist told El Independiente.
In addition, the professional had commented that during the government of Nicanor Duarte Frutos, “serious attacks” against the human rights of patients hospitalized in this system were already being denounced. In fact, the International Commission on Human Rights intervened and penalized the Government of Paraguay regarding the conditions of the Psychiatric Hospital.
Rodas explained that the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture had also revealed from different reports that, in the current psychiatric care system, patients “are treated like things.”
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) maintains, according to Rodas, that only 10 to 20% of psychiatric patients would have to remain permanently hospitalized, which means that 7 or 8 out of 10 hospitalized patients have the capacity to be inserted again the society.
In the community model, it is proposed that the treatment process be humanized and be done outside the hospital, the psychiatrist commented.
In order to transform said “prison” system and guarantee humanized attention, aimed at the reintegration of psychiatric patients, the Solidarity Movement for Mental Health and other social organizations developed a draft to “de-institutionalize” psychiatric care in Paraguay, which should be analyzed in Congress on July 7.
