Home » Covid. Stories of forgotten patients from a class pandemic

Covid. Stories of forgotten patients from a class pandemic

by admin

The ongoing pandemic has dramatically accentuated social inequalities, demonstrating that the ‘residential’ healthcare model for vulnerable people is completely unsuccessful. The institutions (rest homes, residences for the disabled or psychiatric) have proved to be totally unable to protect the health of their guests, while the interventions on the territory, which would be able to reach fragile people at their home, thus guaranteeing their right to health, have been drastically reduced in recent years by cynical and irresponsible policies, which in the name of profit commodify health at the expense of the poorest, thus generating a real deficit of democracy. This is what he writes in a rigorous and passionate way in his book ‘A class virus – Pandemic, inequalities and institutions’ (Edizioni AlphaBeta 2021, pages 144, euro 12) the psychiatrist Benedetto Saraceno, general secretary of the Lisbon Institute of Global Mental Health and former director of the WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse.

Mental health: who has betrayed the Law 180

by Peppe Dell’Acqua


Elderly and disabled left alone

Covid-19 has caused grief, suffering and serious damage both from an economic and social point of view, hitting production activities hard and severely limiting interpersonal relationships. But it was above all the ones who paid the price most vulnerable people and sun, in particular the elderly and disabled. From a fundamental right, health seems to have become, on the basis of the privatist logic that increasingly wants to replace the universalist one at the basis of the National Health Service, a market product. The economist approach that assigns primacy to money over all other human dimensions tragically translates into a devaluation of the existence of people deemed no longer productive: this is the case of the elderly, hit harder by the epidemic than other segments of the population, and not only for their greater physical fragility. Political and economic choices are decisive for the health of citizens, but too often we pretend to ignore their impact, basing public health interventions only on “scientific evidence” and deliberately ignoring that the disease is very often caused directly, and always adversely affected by economic and educational disadvantages.

See also  The post-90s game expert Mao Xingyun committed suicide from the Tencent building. Public opinion is in an uproar | Game Developer | Mao Xingyun | Microsoft MVP |

Mental health, the alarm of the former directors of Trieste: “This is how they cancel the Basaglia model”

by Marco Ballico



Psychiatric care

The Italian model of psychiatric assistancedespite all the shortcomings linked to insufficient investments and often also to the lack of training and motivation of operators, there remains a fundamental experience also for health in general: de-institutionalizing health, abandoning the indiscriminate use of ‘residences’ and favoring instead a widespread distribution throughout the territory of services that can meet people in their real life situations is the only possible way for Saraceno. Transparency in health policy choices, contact with local communities, respect for nature and defense of humanity are the pillars on which to rebuild an authentically democratic health service, devastated in recent years by interventions that have the sole purpose of giving private parts increasingly consistent with the health business. The objective must not be so much that, unrealistic, of bringing the weak to be able to compete with the strong, but rather that of democratizing the system so that between the weak and the strong there is a constant and mutual exchange of skills, interests and rights . Transforming the closed into the open and the inhuman into human was the dream of Franco Basaglia, the psychiatrist behind the closure of asylums in Italy; for Saraceno it is necessary to rediscover utopia, hope and generosity to imagine a true “restart”, impossible if political decisions are always and invariably marked by “that pragmatism that wears to the point of cynicism”.

See also  Digital Transformation in Healthcare on the Rise - Need for...

Francesco Cro is a psychiatrist at the Department of Mental Health, Viterbo

Mental health, more services are needed but something is moving

by Massimo Cozza



.

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More

Privacy & Cookies Policy