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1st appeared
29
February
2000
Report Cites Human Rights Violations in Mexican Psychiatric Hospitals A report co-authored by a UCSF psychiatrist documents appalling conditions in Mexico’s mental health system and makes recommendations for bringing the system into conformity with international human rights conventions. Released recently in Mexico City by Mental Disability Rights International, the report -- titled "Human Rights and Mental Health: Mexico" -- is a result of three visits to Mexican psychiatric hospitals in 1996, 1998, and 1999 by a team of attorneys and psychiatrists, including Robert L. Okin, MD, UCSF chief of psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center and professor of clinical psychiatry at UCSF. "The conditions in most of the Mexican psychiatric hospitals we visited were absolutely shocking," said Okin. "These conditions can only be characterized as degrading and dehumanizing. Living in these grim circumstances, patients are deprived of even their most basic human rights under international law." Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) is an advocacy organization dedicated to the international recognition and enforcement of the rights of people with mental disabilities and has published similar reports for Hungary, Uruguay, and Russia. In a statement that summarized the report, Okin described the conditions of the psychiatric hospitals he visited. Although there have been some improvements since the team first visited in 1996, most hospitals continue to confine patients in wards that are totally barren, devoid of personal possessions and lack any opportunity for personal privacy, said Okin. Either through a lack of adequate food or through insufficient staff to help them eat, many patients seemed to be suffering from malnutrition and had almost skeletal physiques, he said. "There is almost no treatment or rehabilitation in the hospitals, restraint is misused and abused, and day-to-day life is characterized by pervasive inactivity," said Okin. "People sit motionless on chairs or barren floors, are tied into wheelchairs, or spend their days pacing back and forth." Self-abusive children were often restrained for hours at a time either with their shirt sleeves, or with cords which were tied to bed frames, said Okin. Many other children were unable to use their arms or legs because their neurological deficits were aggravated by total physical inactivity and frequent confinement. In certain cases, these children were not even able to swat the flies that crawled over their mouths and eyes all day long, he said. "The absence of physical therapy and other kinds of training will almost certainly prevent these children from ever being able to walk or use their arms and hands to take care of even the most basic aspects of their lives," said Okin. The team visited hospitals where patients were penned all day in a small area and routinely urinated and defecated on themselves and on the floor, said Okin. They were forced to walk through their own urine and feces in bare feet. At one hospital, the team saw children and adolescents lying for hours in their own soiled clothes. "In addition to the way in which these conditions violate patients' human rights, the most tragic part of this entire situation is that it doesn't have to be this way," said Okin. "Most of the patients could live in the community if Mexico had even the most rudimentary system of community services. In the absence of these services, the families of many patients abandon them to the psychiatric hospitals." Link: Mental Disability Rights International Source: Rebecca Sladek Nowlis, News Services |
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