This is a letter from Christopher Francisco Fabrega, Prosecutor of the Section for Protection of Persons with Disabilities in the Office of Jaén: An exercise approach to the struggle and aspirations of people with mental illness, a statement against the injustices that fall on this group, a call to the sanity of a society that ignores and despises the fool because.
During the last few weeks has really hit down on Wall Jumping. Do not want to fan the flames of the controversy on the net about an item probably not malicious, but it has lifted a curtain of prejudice we thought overcome within the health system.
And it hurt us to contemplate the landscape, making more aware of the need for a firm and constant struggle, a non-negotiable and tenacious defense of the rights of persons with mental illness.
And we have found relief in these words ...
"I know what people say about me because I can not hide the bad reputation that I have, even among the most foolish. But I'm the only one, yes, the only one, when I want, I laugh at the gods and men. And proof of this is that as soon as I started talking to this large audience, your faces are lit by new and unaccustomed joy. You smoothing the frown accompanied your applause with a hearty laugh and nice (...) I have seen just appear, you have been drawing a new face. Kind of like when a new bright sun shows its face to the earth, or when a spring, driven by a soft breeze, renew the face of things, it gives them a different color and gives them back their youth. With these words, the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam in The Praise of Folly was that it was submitted. In the nineteenth century German poet Heinrich Heine said: "The true madness may not be anything but the very wisdom that, tired of discovering the nakedness of the world, has taken the wise decision of going mad." And Pinel, considered the great liberator of the madness during the French Revolution added: "Citizen, I am convinced that these madmen are so intractable just because they have been deprived of air and freedom." undoubtedly pleasant visions of the mentally ill that you know that do not correspond with reality. Much tougher, much less pleasant. Enrique González Duro commented at the beginning of his book "Memoirs of a Madhouse" which has its passage through the psychiatric hospital in Jaen and the problems faced in our province the introduction of what then was called "psychiatric reform", which if we ask people in the street on the mentally ill what he really thinks of the mad, the answer would be more or less this: "The crazy I'm afraid, sorrow or disgust. The truth is that I do not worry, they bring me not care. But better not to see or smell. I passed as the Moors and gypsies, the farther the better, do not come to annoy, do not bother, to be removed in the middle, that locked up, as always has been, in a separate place, a site closed, where they are not seen or heard or smelled, where they can be forgotten: Crazy people are from elsewhere and must be in another world. "
I remember when I was a young student of the first courses of law, I had the opportunity to attend a conference that the madness (and called themselves) was held at the headquarters of the CNT of Granada. In those years, early 80's, was beginning in our city psychiatric reform and the call was a certain social unease about what was supposed to "let the lunatics out into the street." Perhaps because it gave me no time to have dealings with the world of mental health, to attend those days. González Duro They gave a lecture on the experience of Jaén. After she opened the floor for questions and ask me if I thought there was madness. His answer was that, medically, the madness does not exist, there is mental illness and logically the mentally ill. I remember many times that answer. Mental illness is an accessory, like any other disease. Personhood, dignity and freedom, carries innate values \u200b\u200bthat inform it, is most important, the substantive. The patient suffering from a mental illness is, above all, a person, a human being. My mate Fernando Santos has an interesting anecdote that reflects what we mean an old prosecutor files a complaint of disability and the defendant goes to his office to be told why. The old Attorney after receiving the person who seems completely lucid and able, studying the documentation and informs: - Oh sure! Are you schizophrenic paranoide.Y the good man replied: - Excuse me, Mr. Prosecutor. What I am is a plumber and, sometimes, I get sick. Illuminating anecdote.
Let us add that the personal development of human beings knows no bounds. A person with a mental illness also known. For only put a few examples of what Vallejo-Najera called "crazy egregious" that are mainstays of our cultural and historical memory: "In art the painter Vincent van Gogh, psychotic and had to be admitted to the hospital of Saint-Remy .- In religion San Juan de Dios, Juan City who, after being admitted to a lunatic asylum in Granada, founded the Hospitaller Order which bears his name after checking conditions treated allí.-mathematician John Nash, Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his theory of balance, which was admitted several times due to his schizophrenia and whose life inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind" won several Oscars, and well as reflecting family and social support, and can afford to live a life completely normalized Mozart enfermo.-musician, suffers from depression and many other virtuosos of the music. Artists, saints and scientists. Mentally ill. People. Men and women can get where they want with a little support and understanding. Humans
with the primary right and we all that, surprisingly, is not enshrined in our constitution, even if it is in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence of the United States July 4, 1776: the pursuit of happiness. It is symptomatic that the first European to be the psychiatric hospital of Our Lady of the Innocents in Valencia, founded in 1409 by Fray Juan Gilabert Joffre, commander of the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, after seeing some young people made fun of a poor patient of insanity. Are no doubt innocent people with the same capacity as others to be happy or unhappy, and they need the support against the barriers imposed by their illness.
From Protection Sections for People with Disabilities has long called Andalusian associations concerned and the family be given the right opportunity. This is not going to solve everything, not have all the answers, nor will the problem disappear. We all know that mentally ill people need medical treatment, but also a profound social intervention, and why not, a strong legal protection of their rights and risks that legal and social life, their situation generates. We have very clear maximum of Hippocrates for physicians: "If you can heal, cure, if you can not cure, palliative, if you can not soften, listen." Kant said that the madness (and sorry to use, once again, a word loaded with negative connotations) is the replacement of common sense by sense. Why is it so difficult to understand and we even get so scared. But to understand we have to listen to those who live and suffer the problem. We have to approach them. Closer to your struggle and your desires.
finish now. I want to do with a poem by Bertolt Brecht, no doubt we all know and who calls us to intervene when there is still time for people who are at risk as a way to save ourselves:
"First they took the Communists, and I said nothing because I wasn'ta communist. Then they took the Jews and I said nothing because I wasn'ta Jew. Then they came for the workers, and said nothing because there was neither workers nor sindicalista.Luego interfered "with the Catholics, and I said nothing because I was protestante.Y when they finally came for me there was nobody left to protest."
text introduced by Esther Sanz (external area clinical psychologist mental health), written by Christopher Ruiz Francisco Fabrega, Prosecutor of the Section for Protection of Persons with Disabilities in the Office of Jaén.
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