Let's seize the opportunity.

There are days when I realize that, while working for the quality of mental health services in spaces where the discourse often becomes complex, within specialization, and the concepts used sound like overly academic constructions, that, deep down, what we are talking about is achieving a very, very simple goal: humanizing the treatment and care in mental health services.

Unfortunately, often, behind the complexity we have to face when we talk about mental health, there is "simply" a violation of people's most fundamental rights. My experience has made me realize that, as humans, we believe that it is less punishable and serious to violate the rights of people who are living a vulnerable moment in their lives. And this, unfortunately, in mental health is, even today, a reality that we see every day.

The right to exercise full citizenship

Ir al artículo

In this close and painful reality we find an initiative promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) to measure and improve the quality and human rights in mental health services: QualityRights . It is a handful of tools, guides and manuals that offer us the opportunity to take an approach based on the human rights and dignity of people with mental health problems, thus seeking to improve their quality of life and their social inclusion. Among the activities promoted by QualityRights are the review of national laws and policies to ensure that they are aligned with human rights, the training of mental health personnel, raising awareness among citizens and the empowerment of people with mental health problems.

This approach aims to change the way people with mental health problems are perceived and treated, with the aim of reducing the stigma and associated discrimination that we mentioned earlier.

We have at our disposal a whole series of means to learn about our rights, to be aware of the violations we receive and, at the same time, to combat the stereotypes that many use as a poor excuse to justify these human rights violations that we too often experience firsthand.

So, this is a great opportunity for all of us. Many of us have experienced first-hand unacceptable rights violations that have affected our discomfort and the discomfort of the people who accompany us on our path to recovery. Often, we have suffered these violations in an environment that is not at all comfortable, which, despite having the mission of helping us and accompanying us in our recovery, has turned us into objects full of negative attributes to those who do not hesitate to discriminate without palliatives. Also often, we have been aware, but we have not known how to give continuity to the anger, pain and injustice that the treatment we have received has generated. Well, it must be done and it must be done to leave a record of each of them so that they do not evaporate and so that the system does not swallow them up as collateral damage where the means are justified by the objective.

The recovery model, a paradigm shift in the approach to mental health

Ir al artículo

We must know that reporting is a tool that as a group we must start using regularly. We must take advantage of these tools that QualityRights offers us and makes available to us to train and empower ourselves and end up knowing our rights better as well as the reporting system that we have at our disposal to defend them. And as QualityRights reminds us, this must be an active participation by people with first-hand experience fighting for our rights and, at the same time, from peer support, creating a network that allows us to fight in company and accompanied.

As a group, we must lose the fear of denouncing the bad practices that as users of mental health services we experience firsthand. We must denounce them while knowing the mechanisms that the administration offers us to record these practices that undermine our most basic rights. And at the same time, we must leave our fears behind and dare to open the door to free justice that we as citizens have at our disposal so that the judicial system can intervene in a public, clear and official way in these situations.

QualityRights help us with this approach and associations of first persons and relatives must make a push , seek the right allies in the system and convert the tools at our disposal as another resource to guarantee us a full recovery that guarantees us the ability to exercise our citizenship, regardless of the vital moment we may be experiencing at any given moment.

And we must do this to fight for a better future that does not allow the perpetuation of certain practices, that does not allow us to act with a sense of impunity that legitimizes certain people from believing that they will not have to take responsibility for what they do, that defends the violated and vulnerable without delay and that works day by day for a change in policies and practices that allow these violations to disappear and never be repeated again.