In recent years, the rulers have been waving the word “deinstitutionalization” as a mantra for all the so-called vulnerable groups.
On the orders of the “Pike”, understand the EU, we take children, old people, mentally ill people from their homes and send them to unknown places, or at least we promise to do so. And all this with the presumption that we protect their rights.
Last – yesterday the Minister of Justice promised to cancel the ban on the mentally ill during a round table on the problems of psychiatry. Repeal by law. And for everyone. To preserve the rights of people who often cannot manage their day properly and take their medication on time, let alone manage their property. Non-governmental organizations insisted on “support, not prohibition” for such people.
As far as I have known our government for a long time, this can happen with the cancellation of the prohibition, but this cannot happen with the support. And so far, with the promise of support, drug addicts and alcoholics are released after treatment, with almost no system of tracking what happens to them afterwards, and with minimal opportunities for rehabilitation. We are closing down the centers that were dealing with this, and we are charging private and non-governmental organizations with the care of their treatment, unless they happen to crash under the influence of alcohol so that we can take their car.
We do not have facilities for hospital treatment of children with addictions, nor sufficiently trained psychiatrists. We feed people in hospitals with food for less than a leva a day, as was made clear at the same round table, but we are as united as a fist when we have to “defend” their rights.
Let’s defend them – the right to a decent life, to normal food, to treatment in conditions that do not humiliate them, to medical personnel sufficient in number to deal with their problems. On medication. Debates have been going on for years about the protection of psychiatry in Radnevo, until a patient assaulted doctors whose rights even the Ministry of Health does not defend.
On the other hand, we are very strong when we have to write laws, concepts and strategies for these same people. Especially if we have to account to Europe. And most often, strategies and concepts are written by defenders of all kinds of rights of vulnerable people, without any idea of their medical problems. Not knowing that some of them are incurable.
The repeal of the ban will be another double-edged sword. With two, because even now there are relatives and friends who illegally dispose of money and property of people with dementia or mental retardation, for example, to their detriment. But if we do away with this altogether, the same people may fall prey to swindlers, who dispose of and abuse them, and finally acquire all their property. I suppose that for the sake of applause from the EU, the state is letting it go.
On this occasion, the head of the Sixth Men’s Ward in Psychiatry in Radnevo, doctor Ivan Dobrinov, commented: “None of the deputies have any idea how to overcome the stigma in society. This is not done with slogans. Many people with mental health problems are victimized on a daily basis by “normal” psychopaths in the community who beat, cheat, exploit, rob, mock, abuse them. Who and how would provide the necessary protection?’
If the state delegates these rights again to private organizations and NGOs, many people will die. “Currently, there are only private homes for people with dementia in our country with prices of 2,000-3,000 BGN. If you don’t have this money, you’re left to fend for yourself and possibly rummage through the buckets,” the former head of psychiatry in Sukhodol, Assoc. Sonia Toteva, added to Dnes.bg. And he makes a comparison with France, where there are sheltered housing for people with such problems, where psychiatrists also work.
“After the ban is lifted, it will be necessary to develop mechanisms to protect severely injured patients who are unable to defend their rights. And at the moment, their abuse is common,” commented Dr. Dobrinov, specifying that he is not a specialist in this particular field, because such people are in the wards for people with mental retardation and schizophrenics.
“Community care is presented as an alternative to hospital treatment. The call for deinstitutionalization is repeated like a magic spell. This brings to mind the famous parable of the blind men and the elephant. Effective care implies the construction of a unified system of coverage, which includes logical next stages, synchronized structures for prevention, emergency psychiatric care, closed hospital wards, psychosocial rehabilitation and resocialization programs, outpatient services, support of relatives, case management, etc. . If we just kick the patients out of the hospitals, many of them will end up on the street and die,” he added.
And this is about to happen because, as the head of psychiatry, Dr. Tsveteslava Galabova, says, “psychiatry has always been the backyard of health care.”
“Social workers are not trained to work with the mentally ill. Little money is allocated. Living conditions are poor. Psychiatric institutions are shacks located on the outskirts of a populated place or in the forest. There are not enough staff. The average age of our nurses is 59 years. No one trains paramedics in psychiatry,” she commented to BNR. The longest stay of a patient in psychiatry was 29 years because their relatives did not want them.
Instead, dozens of “specialists” from NGOs appeared who are ready to take money to protect the rights of people from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. To protect them with the aim of the slogan “What did you give for the front?” in the name of some fictional liberal democracy that uses disabled and autistic children to defend its causes, while neglecting perfectly healthy people who are left to their own devices by the law.
But that’s how it is in the state, when everything is one flight over the cuckoo’s nest, and patients are not always clear. Because in our country psychiatry is the backyard of the health system, but NGOs love it.
2023-09-22 06:24:00
#patients #country #flight #cuckoos #nest
