Action against the 1st Eastern European Psychiatric
Congress in Thessaloniki, Greece, from September 21, 2007
Thousand inmates in Psychiatric Hospitals in all Balkan
countries bear at this very moment the psychiatric brutality and
experience under the most awful conditions their social and biological
death.
Thousand inmates are mechanically or chemically restrained,
are subjected to ECT, are put in isolation and are deprived under
the pretext of "treatment modality" of fundamental human
rights; that is the right to be human.
This situation is not their choice.
It is the choice of a specific social-political-cultural
regime which necessitates the control of the society and the social
extinction of all those who threaten the balance of its development
and reproduction model in order to maintain its stability. This
choice is manifested in the interaction of manifold factors. Which
are these?
Those sciences which intend to shape and define—arbitrarily
but still "in scientific terminology"—the boundaries
between "normal" and "abnormal", "mental health"
and "mental illness" with the conception of various psychiatric,
psychological and sociological theories.
The Psychiatry which—through observation, description
and classification in the framework of the scientific arbitrariness
of the psychiatric nosology in its different variants (traditional,
bio-psychosocial and community)—in synergy with Justice and
drug industry constructs the notions of dangerousness and dangerous
mental patients.
The dominant mental health policies driven exclusively
by fiscal criteria which address the need to reduce the "fiscal
burden", urge privatization or reduction of the number of inmates
in hospitals by transferring the latter from the state-nurtured
"not-for-profit sector" to the new type of institutional
structures in the community.
The mental health professionals, trapped as we are in processes
and mechanisms of alienation, which deny even our human essence
and are transformed, through the educational system, into trained
instruments for the exercise of violence on fellow human beings.
All of us, citizens, which through our tolerance towards the confinement
and extinction of our fellow citizens maintain and reproduce this
situation.
Therefore, the demand for the prohibition and penalization of the
exercise of any form of violence in Psychiatry and the abolition of
confinement places is not merely a humanitarian request but a claim
for our own liberation from the alienation we experience ourselves.