Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-05-Speech-2-330"
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"en.20060905.27.2-330"2
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"Mr President, I thank the Commissioner for his words of welcome on this report.
(In these last weeks we have regained our power of speech and learnt once more to walk with our heads held high.)
The stigma of mental health is as repressive a regime as East Germany was. It stills our tongue, makes us hide our head and our task is to make sure that people with mental health disorders will, with our help, find their voices once again, their dignity, their self-respect and walk once more with their heads held high.
Colleagues, 450 million people in our world live with a mental disorder. One in four of us will suffer from one during our lifetime; 58 000 people in Europe commit suicide every year and ten times that number try to. More people die needlessly from suicide than from road accidents or Aids. Three in every hundred of us will have depression; one in three of us going to our family doctor will have a mental health problem, but only one in six of us will be diagnosed as such. That does not mean that two out of three of us will have good mental health: it means that we may not need, may not seek, or may not be offered treatment. It may mean that we are given inappropriate treatment with drugs, therapies, institutions and laws that at best may do no harm, and at worst may lead to physical and psychological damage. It almost certainly means that we are labelled, patronised, despised, feared and to a greater or lesser extent segregated in society, within our family, at work, at play and even within our health and social services.
In a perverse reversal, we can hide but we cannot run. We cannot perform, we cannot contribute to society as we would wish, we cannot lead full and fulfilling lives, as we would want. It also means that we have barely scratched the surface of creating a policy to promote mental wellbeing among our citizens from their early years, through the adult years of work and leisure and into old age and the years of increasing frailty.
That is why I welcome what has been achieved, firstly by a sequence of Council Presidencies – starting and culminating now with the Finnish Presidency – and by the Commission, where this Green Paper was drafted and will be driven through to active policy-making in the coming months.
When as a child I first came across mental illness, it was something you did not talk about. When I first came across mental health policy it had not progressed far from the locks, bolts, restraint garments, isolation rooms, powers to detain, forcible administration of drugs and so on – or so it seemed. In fact mental health policy has been on the move since the 1960s, with more humane surroundings, treatments and therapies. Patients have been on the move too, going into community housing or back to their own homes. The public has not always liked that. No longer ‘out of sight, out of mind’, it became ‘out of his or her mind and living next door to me and my children’.
If modern, humane mental health policy is to work, it must have a spectrum of care and a range of health and social services, housing, training, transport and other services working in partnership. It must have trust between professionals, patients and families, and it needs our resources. To get those it needs political awareness, and that needs public consent and professional support. A service that does not gain professional, public and political support fails patients and their families doubly. It fails to treat and care adequately and it prompts a downward spiral of public confidence and so reinforces stigma.
Stigma is rampant in all our countries. It is a human rights abuse. It is unintentional, borne out of fear and ignorance, but just as damaging to the individual as any other form of abuse. We all contribute to the stigmatisation of people who, if they had a physical problem, would receive our sympathy and support. However, with mental illness we so often turn away and hope that someone else will cope. Living with mental illness is tough enough without adding to the burden of illness the pain of rejection and stigma. And so we must listen to patients and service users. They should be our partners and not just our patients. We have legislated against discrimination for people with disabilities. Perhaps we need to do so for people with mental health problems – both those in hospital and those in the community.
My report is about these things. It points the way forward to some of the changes we need. If the public believes, they will put pressure on governments, and those governments will then invest in good services. That makes public belief possible. We know that neuro-psychiatric disorders are responsible for a third of disabilities, 15% of in-patient costs, a quarter of drugs costs, half the caseload of social workers and so forth. I want to be sure that if I, my wife or a member of my family has this problem in due course, as one of us is quite likely to, then I want a system in which they are hugged rather than rejected, loved rather than forgotten; a system in which it is not the case that they do not know people or do not know where they are; a system in which they are not within blank, cold, alien walls. I would want them to have hope and not self-fulfilling despair. If we understand that it could be any of us – and it will be many of us – then we will seek a better service.
In my report I quote those words of Stefan Heym from Alexanderplatz in 1989 East Berlin:"@en1
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"Wir haben in diesen letzten Wochen unsere Sprachlosigkeit überwunden und sind jetzt dabei, den aufrechten Gang zu erlernen."1
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