There will be dozens throughout Italy the demonstrations of psychiatrists, other mental health professionals, doctors and health workers, who this evening, from 20, will fill the Italian squares to remember Barbara Capovani, the psychiatrist of Pisa barbarously killed by a former patient entrusted to her by the judiciary who, on leaving work, attacked her with unpredictable violence and unfortunately with results Dramatic.
The events, organized with the support of the Provincial Orders of Doctors and the Italian Society of Psychiatry (SIP), with the support of other professional and scientific societies, aim to raise awareness among the entire population and institutionson the issue of violence in the workplace of health : hospitals, clinics, emergency rooms, residential facilities and, more generally, environments dedicated to the care and rehabilitation of those who suffer, in particular from mental disorders. At the moment the cities involved are: Milan, Turin, Bologna, Cagliari, Palermo, Rome, Teramo, Ragusa, Naples, Genoa, Bari, Perugia, Catania, Syracuse, Bolzano, L'Aquila, San Benedetto del Trento, Messina but in these days of celebration many others have been added.
"The murder of Barbara, of our colleague Barbara, has definitively opened our eyes to a dramatic condition that each of us lives daily on the front line and at every level in the care contexts – explains Emi Bondi, president of the Italian Society of Psychiatry -. It is necessary that everyone finally realizes how, not only in mental health departments, but also in other health places, that care tasks are often overwhelmed by demands for social control that cannot concern doctors and health workers. Our structures, as well as those of health in general, have become places of danger and anguish. More and more frequently, in fact, colleagues who work in emergency rooms are exposed to aggression and intimidation by subjects that we have difficulty defining as patients, as well as family members who demand immediate answers and / or refuse the indications provided by the carers. This state of affairs is no longer acceptable and the lack of solutions to these problems can no longer be postponed. The dramatic story of Barbara, in Pisa, will remain engraved in the hearts of psychiatrists and mental health personnel with all the dismay and anger that similar episodes can arouse in each of us. We hope that the institutions, after years of oblivion, will finally realize that this wave of protest can no longer be stopped and that the requests for help from psychiatric professionals must find adequate answers".
Psychiatry has been the discipline most exposed for years to cuts in resources, especially human and to downsizing the structures necessary to give an active and useful response to patients suffering from mental disorders. Moreover, the increase in referrals to psychiatric services of offendersis shifting the problems of prisons and structures that have replaced the Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals (OPG) - the so-called REMS - on the other structures of psychiatry, forcing it - defenseless - to deal with those who cannot abide by the rules of normal coexistence when these rules have already proven to transgress them widely . From the law of reform of the OPG there are not yet, then, services and differentiated therapeutic-rehabilitative pathsable to guarantee care but also respect for the penalties deriving from the recognition of particularly serious crimes committed by violent subjects. To ensure all this, funding is needed that is proportionate to the commitments that the Services must undertake and new staff adequately trained; psychiatry has become, unfortunately, the last branch of medicine in our country for inadequate funding (less than 3% of the Health Fund, while only in France it exceeds 9%).
All this can only have dramatic consequences that - to the extreme consequences - manifest themselves with episodes such as those that occurred almost everywhere and generate, by level of gravity, the murder of Pisa.
After the entry into force of the law, the OPGs were quickly closed, but the reform has not yet been followed, with offenders who remain free for months waiting for the place in REMS and are, at the same time, entrusted to the "supervision" of health facilities - such as mental health centers - that do not possess capacity to control violence and are constantly exposed to risk.
There are hundreds of reports of violent events every day, but thousands are those not reported due to the obvious impossibility of intervention and response even by the bodies involved such as the judiciary, police and carabinieri.
In this dimension of the problem, the lack of medical specialists and nurses specialized in mental health, as well as the progressive crisis of psychiatric care due to the insufficiency of the places of care, creates an unlivable context despite the fact that the staff in service, underestimated for years, is giving the maximum possible.