The “mass” media, long after specialists, professional media, associations have alerted the damage of certain sectors and, on the degradation of services, end up taking the subject together and at the same time, to raise awareness in the widest opinion. This is the case for the deterioration of the sector of psychiatry, a salutary warning, but which should not only be considered as an effect of fashion media but whose effects are long-lasting and real, for many years. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the US today and recently Fox News have also worried since the beginning of the year of the scandalous state of American psychiatry.
We can indeed consider abandoned psychiatry, the famous “poor relative of our health system” according to the Minister of Health, affected for several years by drastic budget cuts, often accompanied by a beautiful indifference public powers, even contempt or outright rejection, in the recent past with the security obsession as a banner. As if the neglect of care would eliminate mental illnesses and the critical issues they pose to our society as a whole.
Indirectly or directly from this state of affairs derive several disturbing observations:
- The lack of means not only to equip the services and devices but also to think the current psychiatry.
- The alternation between confinement and neglect of patients left to their own devices, one consequence of insufficient means: Psychiatric Center engorged, lack of psychiatrists (but whose fault?). The announcements of the Ministry of Health in January 2019 concerning, among other things, an extension of the budget appearing to be derisory.
- The transfer of the populations belonging to the psychic care to the medico-social sector, concern solely centered on the problem of placement and not care.
- The preponderance of neuroscientists that leads to a conception of care based solely on the symptom to the detriment of the subject as a whole.
But there is even more profoundly a major obstacle to a better listening to the problems raised by the reception of the mentally ill: it is the misunderstanding for many years of the nature of mental illness, of its radical difference with the models of organic diseases and, therefore, the need to develop a concept of care as close as possible to the subject and to construct truly welcoming institutional settings for and with the mentally ill.
And this obstacle, we, unfortunately, know that too well. The “new management”, applied to hospitals and healthcare facilities in general, affects all health care providers as well as social workers. The procedures, evaluations, and protocols have led to remote practices of the patients and have transformed the institutions into organizational platforms whose concern is above all the so-called “rational” planning, both for costs and for individuals. Can this “technologic” become secondary in order to restore care to the psychiatric hospital, as elsewhere, to a human dimension? There is the mental health of patients, of course, but also that of all caregivers!
