The Autonomous Communities and the Ministry of Health will undertake on Friday one of the great pending subjects: the First National Plan for Prevention of Suicide and the Mental Health Strategy. The project arrives at the Interterritorial Health Council with the urgency of the … affected families and with the despair of professionals without means to undertake the outbreak of psychiatric diseases after the pandemic. But it also lands with sea in the background to the meeting.
Among the professionals who have collaborated with the Mónica García Ministry to write the plan there is a generalized agreement with the lines of action marked to improve suicide prevention, although not so much with the strategy to improve the assistance of other mental health problems.
The ordering of the intertritorial day includes a new mental health action plan that does not convince psychiatrists who have participated in their elaboration together with associations of affected and the Ministry of Health itself.
The disagreement is so great that the Spanish Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health, as well as some psychiatrists who have collaborated in a personal capacity, have sent a letter to the Ministry of Health in which they ask that their participation in the project be erased. In it, they ensure that the final document that the health directors of the different communities “do not feel represented” will discuss today.
The letter, addressed to the Commissioned for Mental Health, Belén González, recriminates the Ministry team that the Mental Health Action Plan does not collect two of its main claims: increase the number of psychiatrists and psychologists and eliminate the stigmatization of medicines Psychiatric.
Psychiatrists are concerned that the Ministry’s strategy directly advocates discharge, that is, stopping antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytic and other psychiatric medications used in common practice.
The psychiatrists requested in the writing of the final document that would speak of rational use of these treatments. «If we advocate the discomfort, we would be demonizing and stigmatizing drugs that are very useful and necessary in the treatment of many patients. “We believe that rational use is the most appropriate term and the one that best suits reality,” defends ABC Marina Díaz Marsa, president of the Spanish Psychiatry Society.
Nor does the president of the psychiatrists that limit the number of places to form psychiatrists in the MIR understand. «Now hospitals are offering one hundred percent in child psychiatry, 98% of adult psychiatry and a similar amount of clinical psychology. We need more and more professionals and the objective of the Ministry of Health is to reduce it. We cannot understand it, ”he explains to ABC.
Celso Arango is director of the Institute of Psychiatry and Mental Health of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital
Ignacio Gil
Psychiatrist Celso Arango signs with Díaz Marsa the letter to the Ministry of Health. He assures that it is the first time in many years of work with the Ministry and more than ten consecutive ministers of different political parties that meets a document with his name that comes through the press and not of the government itself. Arango, director of the Institute of Psychiatry and Mental Health of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid, not only worries to appear in a final version of a document that does not know. Also the conclusions and objectives included in this latest version of the plan, especially for the reduction of specialists. “It is a joke,” he says that the Human Resources indicator of the Mental Health Action Plan is to offer 90 percent of the psychiatry places when almost one hundred percent has already been offered for years.
“I feel used”
Arango explains that the least voted lines of action are those that have finally given more weight in the final writing of the document. «The comments and suggestions exposed have not been collected. I feel used. This had never happened to any other team from the Ministry of Health in twenty years, ”he says.
The Spanish psychiatry society also believes that there is a much more negative image than the country’s mental health care is and reality is not reflected. For example, it is stated that autonomous communities have no resources to avoid hospitalization of children and adolescents with mental disorders. “That is an insult to the autonomous communities that are taking measures to avoid income” and this psychiatrist recalls the youthful infant programs of mental health centers and day hospitals that have been implemented in many territories.
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