Independent Psychiatric Group

The Independent Psychiatric Group was formed in 1978-1979, nearly 50 years ago, by mental health professionals (mainly psychiatrists) and other interested parties. They recorded their positions in the following declaration. An important document that reflects the state of mental health at the time, in the public and private sector, and the Group’s proposals.

A year later, in 1980, the Open Psychotherapy Centre and the “Movement for the Rights of the Mentally Ill” were founded, later renamed “Freedom is Therapeutic”. Most of the founding members of the Centre and the Movement actively participated in the Independent Psychiatric Group. Both the Centre and the Movement constituted a practical intervention in mental health, implementing and promoting the following positions.

INDEPENDENT PSYCHIATRIC GROUP

STATEMENT

Public Psychiatric care in our country, provided by the public sector, has become entrenched in the asylum model of dealing with mental illness as it was formed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, while the care provided by the private sector, apart from these characteristics that in a few cases it has simply made attempts to embellish, has taken on a monstrous speculative character.

The violent removal of the mentally ill from the space in which they live, their isolation in nightmarish inhumane institutions, their therapeutic treatment only with biological methods within the disciplined and authoritarian institution (which in essence has the character of criminal intervention), the lack of any serious effort for their creative return to society, due to the absence of even some elementary social policy, constitute the main characteristics of the asylum treatment – characteristics that are considered absolutely justified by their supporters, since they are based on perceptions of dangerousness and hereditary abnormality, which which rationalize the dismissive attitude of society as a whole but also of official psychiatry, whose institutions remain silent every time the psychiatric problem comes to the surface.

The issue of legislation related to psychiatric care, the structure and operation of public psychiatric institutions and private clinics, but also the very issue of mental illness, its precipitating causes and contributing factors, are problems that have become topical and pressing. Ignoring them makes things worse.

The Psychiatric Group is an effort to bring together psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, occupational therapists, nurses, those who have experienced or are experiencing psychiatric oppression on a daily basis, and anyone who has a connection or interest in the psychiatric problem. It was created based on the need to propose radical solutions and to undertake specific initiatives to change this psychiatric model in our country.

The following statements constitute the fundamental terms for bringing together the members of the Psychiatric Group for joint action.

1. The main factors in the abuses of psychiatry against the sick but also (in not a few cases) people without psychiatric problems are the authoritarian political regime, the professionally corrupt, scientifically inadequate and ethically flawed psychiatrist and to some extent the fact that all psychiatric treatment methods are imperfect and therefore suitable for abuse. We believe that the psychiatrist does not have the responsibility of safeguarding any kind of social or political peace and security and we cannot accept the manipulation of psychiatry by extra-psychiatric mechanisms.
2. The treatment facilities for those with psychiatric problems must cease to be either prisons from which various stories of horror and brutality are known every now and then (beatings, criminalization of therapeutic methods, isolation and tying, prohibition of all communication with the outside world, reading and censorship of correspondence, exploitation of the work of the hospitalized, etc.) or centers of speculation, and be transformed into real sanatoriums.
   Therefore, we support the following:

• Abolition of the smuggling of patients that takes place between certain psychiatrists and private clinics with the well-known 30% kickback. Abolition of private clinics.
• Creation of Psychiatric Units in General Hospitals, with day centers in each psychiatric unit.
• Organization of independent outpatient clinics, counseling centers and psychiatric first aid services.
• Formation of appropriate clinical and outpatient therapeutic frameworks for the treatment of various psychiatric conditions.
• Enrichment of psychiatric hospitals with the entire spectrum of psychotherapeutic possibilities and staffing them with personnel with the most diverse theoretical preferences.
• Abolition of hierarchy and autocracy in the psychiatric field and their replacement by the Psychiatric Team that