SLP, Mexico.- Jorge Félix Otero Seijas, a young man with schizophrenia diagnosismild mental retardation and epilepsy, is admitted, against the will of the family, to the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana, where he remains handcuffed to a bed.
According to the testimony offered to CubaNet by his uncle, the LGBTI activist Jimmy Roque MartínezIn August, Jorge Félix suffered a decompensation of his psychiatric condition due to a lack of medication. During that period, for the first time, the 33-year-old left home and wandered through areas of Vedado.
One of those days he ended up at the General Directorate of the PNR in the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, where he had a verbal confrontation with the police, who accused him of contempt. According to the family, there was no physical assault and the episode was a “manifestation directly from his decompensated state of mental health.”
Jorge Félix spent several days detained at the Zapata y C police station and was then taken to the psychiatric ward of the Diez de Octubre Clinical Surgical Hospital, according to the story of those close to him.
However, on September 26, having been evaluated by the Institute of Legal Medicine, they ratified the accusation of contempt and committed him “indefinitely” to the Havana Psychiatric Hospital, where he is handcuffed to the hospital’s bed. hospital. “Sometimes they have even delayed allowing him to perform his physiological needs.”
The young man’s mother and uncle, in a letter addressed to the Attorney General’s Office, demanded his immediate release, alleging that Otero Seijas remained under the care of his family and left home that only time because he was not under the influence. of drugs, despite the fact that at home they make every possible effort to obtain medicines on the legal or informal market.
“We find it unacceptable that it is the same State, by failing in its obligation to guarantee access to necessary medical treatments, that is now punishing Jorge for the consequences of this lack of resources,” they wrote.
In turn, they asked the Prosecutor’s Office to reevaluate the decision to hospitalize Jorge Félix Otero Seijas and demanded “his immediate release, guaranteeing that he can receive outpatient treatment, under medical supervision and with assured access to his medications.”
“We ask that a transparent investigation be initiated to clarify who was responsible for authorizing a contempt complaint in a case where his medical care clearly should have been prioritized,” the letter concluded.
