Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-05-Speech-2-338"
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"en.20060905.27.2-338"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I hope that this Green Paper sends out a signal, at long last, in favour of improving mental health in the EU. Increased political awareness of the mental wellbeing of European citizens is long overdue. In my view, however, it is a serious omission that neither the report of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety nor the Commission proposal contains a comprehensive causal analysis.
We know that environmental pollution, poor diet and food allergies have an effect on both physical and mental wellbeing. The effects of toxic chemicals on hormonal balance are evident. There is a pressing need for an analysis to be carried out at long last of neurological disturbances resulting from environmental toxins and pesticides, and of the connection between attention deficit disorder and food intolerances.
We also know that highly gifted children and young people, for example, often wrongly end up receiving psychiatric treatment owing to a failure to recognise them as such. There must be greater readiness to deal with this issue, too. This is also the reason for my concern about the risk of the pharmaceutical industry jumping on the bandwagon and promoting medicines as the only solution.
We need to tackle the issue of the need to perform a comprehensive approach involving analysis and treatment instead of further medicalising and pathologising life cycles. After all, it is unacceptable that healthy, lively children, children who had previously been considered perfectly healthy, should now be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and be prescribed medication, and it is also unacceptable that young people should be exposed to high levels of violence in the media and then labelled as psychologically ill and prescribed medication.
We must also ask ourselves whether there can ever be a guarantee of happiness in our consumer society, and therefore whether it sends out the wrong signal to automatically treat people with antidepressants every time they are grieving or in a bad mood – things that we all have to go through.
My concern, therefore, is that we may be setting the wrong course with this Green Paper, and also with a White Paper. We should carry out a causal analysis and should not rely solely on prescribing medication. Parliament’s call for medicines to be used as a last resort, once the causes of the psychological illness have been sufficiently explained, should be central, and we cannot let ourselves become the lackeys of the pharmaceutical industry and dedicate ourselves to further pathologising and medicalising life cycles and processes."@en1
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